


Photophobia

by Stealth_Noodle



Category: Final Fantasy I
Genre: Adventure, Canon - NES, Fun with Game Mechanics, Gen, Mid-Canon, Original Character(s), Status Effects, Vampires, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-29
Updated: 2013-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-09 18:52:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/pseuds/Stealth_Noodle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Light Warriors' battle against Melmond's vampire has unexpected consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on the NES version, so we're dealing with Soft potions instead of Golden Needles, Coneria instead of Cornelia, etc.

[The Earth Cave, six days before Midsummer]

Ten seconds into the battle with the vampire, everything had already gone wrong. Arik had rushed in, of course, and now he stood frozen with his club held overhead, eyes startled wide and mouth caught open. Bao, suddenly bereft of back-up, lost her contest of reflexes; in the space of a blink, one of the vampire's chalk-white fists sent her flying into the cavern wall. The crack of the impact echoed through the chamber, and Mina cut off her casting with a gasp just in time to raise her sword against the monster streaming toward her through the guttering torchlight.

Will hated triage.

But unknown curses were a waste of precious seconds, and Mina had parried at least the initial assault, so he ran to Bao, who stopped struggling as he fumbled his hands under her tunic. Panic hissed in the back of his mind, but Will refused to heed it. Healing was difficult enough without distraction. Paring the world down to hands, light, and jagged breathing, he let the magic burst through his palms and into the bare skin of Bao's back.

Mina screamed.

Bao sprang up and past him, leaving Will light-headed as he threw himself into a spell to burn the flesh of the undead. The room blurred and watered as he turned; he scarcely caught himself against the wall before he fell. With his free hand he directed the energy out of his body and into a lightning-bright arc that struck the vampire's chest, eliciting an inhuman shriek. Bao tackled the flailing creature as Will's knees buckled.

There came a dull, heavy thunk, followed by Bao's shout of "The head, cut off the _head_," then papery silence as ashes filled the air.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, Will looked up from the ground in time to see Arik snap out of his trance and fall forward amid the continuation of his earlier string of curses. Bao rose, stake in hand, and strode over to him. "Next time we have the element of surprise," she said, "let's try to keep it."

"Son of a bitch knew we was there," Arik rasped. His voice had never fully returned; Will didn't know if the fault lay with the magic or the delay, or if the whisper persisted for the same reason that even the most talented healers could not prevent scars. "Don't matter. He's dead now."

As Bao began to debate the merits of this philosophy, Will got to his feet and shuffled over to Mina, who was still red-faced and breathless as she wiped ashes and curdled black blood from her sword. A darker red stained the fabric over her left clavicle.

"You're bleeding." Will raised his hand, suffusing it with pale light, but Mina stepped out of range and used her free hand to daub her own magic over the wound. As the sparks settled, she winced and rubbed her shoulder.

"I'm fine," she said before he could ask. "It just stung a bit. Must've gone deeper than I thought."

The shadows in the room shifted before Will could press the issue. "Regardless," said Bao, in a tone that extended her dismissal to everything that was not the recent explosion of the vampire, "what matters is finding the altar and stopping the rot."

Will turned to where she stood with the torch. The fire illuminated the vampiric remains scattered over her hair and face, and Will wondered if there had, in fact, been enough vampire to account for all the dust. People had more blood in them than their shapes suggested; perhaps the veins of vampires were packed tight with ashes.

"Spread out, but don't wander out of earshot," Bao continued. "Mina, another light, if you will."

Once Mina had flicked a bit of fire magic onto a spare torch, they split off in pairs, Will following Mina along the eastern wall. The vampire had been something of a packrat; bones and old clothes lay in piles, decorated with pottery and broken bits of weapons and armor. A red braid, tied at either end with yellow ribbon, curled around a chipped wooden helmet to brush against a ceramic plate.

Mina wrinkled her nose. "Why do they always have to keep trophies?"

A skull grinned up at Will, embroidered handkerchiefs stuffed in its eye sockets. "This is even worse than Garland. These are all people he ate."

"Right," she said, turning to follow the wall again, "let's just find the altar. I don't want this stuff turning up in my dreams tonight."

Will followed her past the succession of keepsakes, trying not to keep count of how many victims would have been necessary to decorate the lair. Dragons, he had heard, hoarded gemstones, but the vampire's tastes seemed to run largely to the organic. The few shiny objects would probably disappear once Arik found them.

Just ahead of him, Mina's light illuminated an alcove that, on closer, inspection, ended in a little wooden door. "We've found another room back here," Mina called, angling her torch back around the corner and waving it for attention. "Will and I've got it." Before Will could suggest that the other half of the party be more directly involved, she pushed through the portal and lit up a narrow corridor beyond. The reek of decay made Will cough.

Mina frowned and pulled part of her cape over her lower face. "I'll be so glad when we go somewhere that doesn't smell like cows died in it," she muttered, heading down the passage with Will at her heels. Creatures with too many legs skittered and burrowed into the earthen walls as the torchlight flooded over them.

She halted. "Oh."

Will was about to ask what she'd seen when he felt something hot and oppressive flowing past her body and into his. His temples began to throb. Peering around Mina's shoulder, he saw at the end of the corridor an enormous stone plate sunk deep into the earth. Dark energy rose from it like a heat distortion, and Will had to fall back to forestall a migraine. Even Mina, who had a less pronounced sensitivity to magic, made it only a few steps closer before retreating with watering eyes.

"Can you tell what kind of curse that is?" she asked.

Will braced himself and took a step forward, only to be kicked back with enough force to stagger him. He grabbed Mina's shoulder to keep from toppling over. "Can't even try," he said. "Whatever did this, I don't think it was human."

Footsteps drew his attention to the other end of the passage, where Bao appeared minus Arik and her torch. Her question cut itself off as her gaze fell on the plate. Reaching into her knapsack, Bao strode past them, pulled out one of the black orbs, and held it over the plate. Will's brain hummed as if it had sprouted bee wings. When Bao put the orb away again, the sensation faded as quickly as it had come.

Mina, meanwhile, had stumbled backward and begun to sway. Even in the torchlight Will could see that all the color had drained from her face. "It'sit's down there," she managed, shaking off Bao's offer of support. She steadied herself and glared at them. "It's also full of worms. Don't ever do that again without warning me."

With a short nod, Bao cracked her knuckles and tried, bare-handed, to pry the plate from the ground. When that failed, she began kicking it.

"It's cursed," Will and Mina said in unison.

After a final kick that looked to be more stress relief than serious effort, Bao wiped her forehead and returned to the group. "Can you two do anything about it?"

Mina shook her head. "We can't even get close to it."

With an irritated glance at the plate, Bao headed back to the vampire's chamber, saying, "There's nothing else for us to do here, then. Maybe that sage knows something about it."

"This had better not turn out like that mess with the elves," Mina said under her breath. "We're not a delivery service." Will wanted to point out that they had accomplished far more in the way of making deliveries than they had in the way of restoring the balance of the elements, but he had learned long ago that it was unwise to play devil's advocate with the recently injured. Instead he made a note to inspect her shoulder when the party next made camp; the bloodstain seemed larger every time he looked at it, and conditions were ideal for infection.

As he re-entered the vampire's chamber, Will took a deep breath of the relatively less foul air. The sound of bickering drew his attention to the other end of the room, where Bao had cornered Arik and his suspiciously bulky sack.

"What did you find?" she asked.

"Nothin'."

"I'm not convinced." Bao snatched the torch from him and held it over the mouth of his bag. "Something in there is gleaming, Arik."

Arik scowled down at her. "What, I don't get no keepsakes?"

"A ruby the size of my fist is not a 'keepsake.' The vampire must have stolen it from someone. Perhaps the sage."

"Is it real?" Mina squeezed between the two of them and peered with glittery-eyed fascination into the sack. "I've never seen one this size that didn't turn out to be glass."

The task of discerning the value of treasure generally fell to Mina, as Arik had all the discrimination of a magpie and Bao became irritable in the presence of anything worth more than a few coins. Will didn't even try. In the clinic, the closest he had come to participating in financial transactions was when the poor, unable to afford what the wizards asked and unwilling to subject themselves to conditional charity, made their way to the apothecary's shed with offerings of eggs and produce. When a few apples could denote gratitude for anything from an eased headache to a reattached finger, it became difficult to think of money in anything but fluid terms.

Mina drew the gem out and turned it over in her hands, letting the torchlight reflect from the smooth surface as a brilliant, shifting star. Arik watched with sullen curiosity. When she looked up to give her report, her cheeks were flushed. "It must be real. The weight feels right, and I don't see any silvery bits in it. But the size of it..." She caressed the ruby with her thumb. "I wonder if the rot has anything do with it."

"Well, that's another thing to ask the sage." Bao grabbed the gem and tucked it away in her bag, to the audible displeasure of both Mina and Arik. She turned back in the direction they had come, back to the narrow, putrid tunnels and the dead things that crept in the darkness. "Let's not tarry."

* * *

[Coneria, forty days before Midsummer]

Thunder woke him. Groggy, heart pounding from some fast-forgotten nightmare, Will sat up on his pallet and tried to orient himself in time. He'd come back from the evening meal and lain down to rest, and if he'd managed to fall into such a deep sleep, he was probably stretching himself too thin in his master's absence

Noise rattled the walls again, and this time Will recognized it as knocking. He rose and took hold of his lantern in the same automated motion, steering himself in the darkness toward the hook that held his robe. Once he had covered himself and lit the wick, he paused a moment to compose himself (but only a moment; the condition of whoever had come to see him wouldn't be improved by standing around in the deluge), then raised his lantern and cracked open the door.

At his threshold stooped a woman nearly as swarthy as he was, wearing the soaked but immediately recognizable uniform of a wandering monk. She was bent nearly double under the weight of the body she bore on her back, and little wonder; muscular as she was, the man she carried was half again her size, his limp arms as thick as an ogre's. His pale face lolled over her shoulder, slack and splotchy atop a raw, bruised neck.

She looked as if she wanted to speak, but the rain or her burden or Will's youth tied her tongue, and it fell to him to break the silence.

"I'm sorry, I don't handle funerals." Will lowered the light, letting the woman's face fall back into shadows. "If you go around back of the clinic"

"He's not dead."

Will hesitated, took a deep breath, and opened his door to the storm. The woman staggered past him and laid the man's body carefully on the floor, then knelt beside it, sliding a knapsack from her shoulders. Will bit his lip as he slid the lock back into place; then he set his lantern on the floor and let training take over.

"How much time has passed since the injury?" he asked, resting his fingers against the ruined throat. With a little searching, he detected the ghost of a pulse.

The woman stared at her knees. "I don't know. It can't have been long." Something about that statement seemed to sit badly with her; she cursed, punched the floor, and mumbled an apology.

Maybe it didn't matter how much time had passed. Will had learned the questions by rote when he was still an oblate, but he had never been asked to apply them to a near-corpse fresh from a gibbet. Closing his eyes for concentration, he wrapped his hands gently around the man's neck and began to channel healing magic.

The chapped skin knitted smooth, but the contusions were another matter entirely. Internal injuries could present a challenge to a high wizard, and Will, scarcely even a mage, fumbled in mental darkness, trying to draw an outline of a healthy throat for the magic to follow. Impatience, inattentiveness, ignorancethe slightest error would fuse the windpipe shut and finish what the noose had begun, but delay carried equal risks for both patient and healer. Will forced the last of his strength into his magic, fighting to ignore the tremors wracking his hands and the stars bursting in his brain.

The patient's throat trembled with the force of a gasp.

"Look, it worked," Will managed, sinking back in exhaustion. He was certain that this was not a professional thing to say after a healing, but his body felt like a sack of pudding and his mind teetered on the edge of consciousness.

The cadence of the rain lulled him. Will had almost forgotten the woman's presence until he heard her say, "Thank you."

There was a rote response, but Will couldn't call it to mind. "I do what I can," he replied, opening his eyes and ignoring the inner voice that thought he sounded silly. As he wobbled to his feet, Will looked down at the results of his handiwork and was pleased to see that, while the scarring was extensive and fiercely pink, the skin around it was smooth, and the bruising had at least begun to fade.

The man twitched in his sleep, his breaths shallow and hoarse. Setting a hand against the wall for balance, Will let his gaze wander over his patient. Heavily muscled, hirsute as a dwarf, shaggy auburn hair tied back with a filthy bandannathe man could not have looked more like a bandit if he had been holding a knife to Will's ribs and demanding gold. The city guard regularly caught and hanged gangs of robbers, and while it was possible that a few of them, through some quirk of the noose, lingered longer than their executioners were willing to stand around waiting on a rainy night, Will thought it unlikely that an order of monks had dedicated itself to saving them.

The woman took off her sandals and propped them up against the wall to dry. She seemed more inclined to stare at the hanged man than explain herself, so Will asked, "Who are you?"

There was a heavy pause, during which the only sounds were distant thunder and the man's labored breaths. When the woman spoke, her voice was measured. "Ling Bao, of the Temple of Divine Light. Who he is doesn't matter."

Circumstances suggested that his identity mattered a great deal to someone, but Will saw no point in pursuing the question. Instead he asked, "Why me?"

This time the hesitation was less pronounced. "I used to live around here. Back then, the apothecary was the only one who took the vows seriously. Looks like nothing ever really changes, at least as far as clinics go."

A stirring defense of his order declined to present itself. Instead Will said, "My master's away on business. Usually I just keep the potions organized."

"Oh? I had to stuff the straw back into the dummies." Bao sounded distant, and her gaze was focused somewhere between the hanged man and the opposite wall.

Deciding that there was no point in trying to prolong the conversation, Will made his way across the room to the storage area, keeping his hand on the wall for support.

He didn't need to bring the lantern. Securing the position of apprentice potions-keeper had been no challenge for Will, not after the wizards discovered that he kept his belongings so precisely organized that he could add new notes to his spellbook in total darkness. In a few decades or so, Will supposed that the same compulsive quirks would ensure that he succeeded his master in mixing and brewing all the clinic's medicines. Now, all he had to do was let his fingers brush lightly against the rows of vials until he counted eight to right of the first purifying potion.

After leaving a tally mark in the inventory tome (seventeenth page, fourth line down, twenty-two ticks overwhy would anyone need a light?), Will shut the door and came back to the room proper, where the hanged man still wheezed insensibly and Bao stared into a moody world a thousand leagues away from the real one. Ignoring his stomach's call for a post-healing snack, Will sat down on the floor to wait.

The hanged man's hand shot to his throat as he bolted upright. Gasping frantically, he glanced around the room with wild, bloodshot eyes until his gaze fell on Bao. He twice mouthed something before managing, in a dry croak, "Lottie?"

Bao's lips parted, but she only stared at him with one of the most intensely indecipherable looks Will had ever seen.

Meanwhile, the man's attention had returned to his neck. His thick fingers swept from the red bristles of his beard down to the hollow of his throat, then circled around to his nape. Locking eyes with Bao, he made a series of strained, shallow coughs. "Shit, you dead, too?"

"You aren't dead," said Will, setting the potion in front of him, "and you shouldn't talk yet. Drink this."

"The hell I ain't dead." The man spared Will a glare and made no move to accept the medicine.

Bao's jaw clenched. After a long breath, she said, in a tone increasingly divorced from the stilted one she had used with Will, "You _should_ be dead, you idiot, I thought I was going to bury you when I cut you down"

A broad, disruptive smile spread over the man's face. "Lottie," he said fondly.

She scowled and pointed to her black belt. "I haven't been Lottie since I left the woods. It's Ling Bao now."

The answering sound was so strangled and dry that Will had to rely on the man's expression to interpret it as laughter. "Sweet hell," he said in a graveyard whisper at odds with his grin. "Whassit been, ten years?"

"Fourteen." Bao's lips twitched, as if they had decided to curve upward regardless of her wishes. She stopped fighting them. "You _idiot_."

Whatever was happening in Will's shed was happening without him. Although the kitchen had closed hours ago, he knew where the cellarer hid the spare key, and if God hadn't meant for Will to filch a bit of dinner, God wouldn't have delivered a hanged man to Will's doorstep. He slipped out into the rain and locked the door behind him.

The cold water revived his senses and sharpened his focus. By the time Will had settled in the kitchen and eaten a bit of cheese (along with a hunk of bread, an apple, and the last quarter of a bottle of wineGod owed him), he had stopped musing on the nature of his supplicants' prior relationship and begun considering what he was meant to do with them if they didn't leave on their own. His master knew how to manage strange, likely criminal visitors, but his master was somewhere in the tiny settlements beyond the city walls. Will had once let a convalescing "adventurer" make a nuisance of herself for nearly a week while the apothecary was away, and he had no desire to repeat the experience.

But he was wet and the kitchen was cold, and there was no sense sitting around borrowing trouble. After coaxing the last few drops from the wine bottle, Will tidied up and headed back across the muddy grounds. The rain glued his nightclothes to his body and ran in cold rivulets down his neck.

When he let himself back into his shed, he found himself in the middle of an argument.

"It's a sense of purpose, which is something you've certainly never had before"

"I got a purpose," the man snarled, or at least tried tothe effect was rather spoiled by his broken-whisper voice and his clapping a hand to his throat in pain. Glowering, he added at a lower volume, "M'purpose is hittin' people over the head and takin' their things."

"And that's worked out so well for you. Excuse me for interrupting."

Will banged the door shut to get their attention. "You really need to drink that potion," he said, hanging his sodden cloak up to dry. "You don't want to develop an infection."

"An' just what if I do?" the man muttered, but he did, wincing, down the contents of the vial. In the relative silence, Will felt an odd humming in the back of his mind, as if something he'd forgotten years ago had woken up stir-crazy.

When the man finished, he rasped, "Didn't help. Y'got any whiskey?"

"Arik, no." Bao snatched the empty vial away before he could toss it into the corner. "You should be thanking..." She trailed off and gave Will a contrite look. "I never asked your name."

"It's William. Will, usually. Don't worry about it." Professionalism was still tricky; Will had yet to get the hang of the apothecary's easy indecorum. He tried to imagine how his other superiors would have reacted in his position, but he found it impossible to imagine them getting into such a situation in the first place. The clinic's high wizard in particular could always be counted upon to discover, before any spells were cast, exactly what had befallen his patients and how they intended to pay their impending debts.

The hanged man seemed to be unfamiliar with gratitude, let alone restitution. "M'neck's still broke."

"No, it isn't," said Bao.

"Well, it ain't fixed."

"Right, he only brought you back from the _brink of death_." She turned an appraising look on Will. "Which is quite impressive for a novice."

Before he could reply, she picked up her knapsack. Will noticed now that it had an unyielding shape, suggesting that it was reinforced with something tougher than the outer layer of cloth. Opening it seemed to be a complicated process, and when Bao finished doing so, the back of Will's skull buzzed.

The sensation dulled when Bao withdrew her hands, cupped around something that Will couldn't see. She studied his face for a moment before saying, "Huh, I thought you'd be Earth."

"I don't understand," said Will.

Bao reached into the bag again. "Here, try this one."

She opened her hands to reveal a black orb nearly the size of a human heart, so dark that it seemed to repel the light, and for a twisting moment Will was uncertain whether it was a real, physical thing or a hole cut through the world. On impulse, he reached out to touch it and felt nothing, not even cold, though his hand stopped as if it had met a barrier. The vibrations in his head trickled down through his limbs and torso.

The orb chimed. It wasn't a sound, not exactly, but Will didn't know how to describe the sense that he had been suspended skinless in a cataract while the water plucked his tendons like lute strings. He realized that he was gasping.

As Will got his breath and bearings again, Bao set the orb on the table and gave him a weary smile. "Well, that's three."

* * *

[The Melmond marshes, five days before Midsummer]

"Y'ain't eatin' your rabbit," said Arik darkly.

Will, who had witnessed most of Arik's curse-laden culinary battle earlier in the evening, straightened up and tried to pretend that the stringy meat had been spiced and boiled into tender perfection. Then he noticed that Arik's glare was directed across the campfire at Mina.

She shrugged. "I'm not hungry."

"Not hungry." Arik wheezed. "We fight a goddamn vampire and she ain't hungry."

"You should still eat," said Bao. "We don't know what's going to be in that cave tomorrow."

Mina shrugged again and got to her feet. "Bugs and undead, I'm sure. If we're in for such a big day, I'll go ahead and turn in."

Once she had disappeared into the tent, Will set down the bite of rabbit for which he'd been bracing himself and said, "I wish she'd let me have a look at that wound. The way she's been acting, it's probably not healing right."

"Perhaps." Bao shifted, refolding her legs. "More likely, her Orb is reacting to the rot."

"Or maybe she's just a bitch," said Arik.

Bao gave him a stern look. "You've got rabbit in your beard."

Taking advantage of the distraction, Will tipped the last of his dinner to the campfire and leaned back against the relatively solid land. After their first disastrous camping adventure outside the Marsh Cave, the party had learned how to identify and take advantage of firm ground, though Will doubted any of them had realized how much that knowledge would later benefit them. The dwarves had expressed concern over the rot, of course, but a world of nightmares lay between the rumors and the reality of the fuscous earth that oozed infection. Melmond hung from the rest of the continent like an gangrenous limb, and no amount of dwarven explosives would be able to amputate it. Will caught himself imagining Coneria overcome by the rotstreets and buildings sinking into the fetid dirt, corpses vomited from the graveyardsand tried to distract himself with constellations.

Grass stirred in the breeze and tickled his left wrist. A split-second later Will remembered that there was no grass beneath him, and he jerked upright as white-hot pain pricked his hand.

"Antidote" made it out of his mouth before fire swept through him, seizing up the muscles in his arm. Fast-acting, probably a spiderhad to _get_ the spider, but it was already gone or lost in his robes or skittering beneath his skin. The flesh at the base of his thumb bloomed purple.

Glass clinked as Bao upended the entire bag of potions into Will's lap. "Hell if we know," said Arik.

"They're labeled." Reconsidering Arik's literacy, Will added as he fumbled for the right vial, "And green."

Pain coursed up his arm with each heartbeat. Shaking, Will tried to uncork an antidote and slumped in relief when Bao opened it for him. Sweat broke over his face in icy beads.

"Here." Bao's free hand cupped the back of Will's head as she set the vial to his lips. The liquid slid down his throat like a cat shredding its way down a silk curtain. In response to his coughing fit, she thumped his back and asked, "Do you need another?"

Will coughed again and shook his head. The pain in his throat dulled as the cure took effect, bubbling cold through his veins. Tainted blood began to spurt from the tiny holes left by the spider's fangs.

"Hell of a bite," said Arik as the bloodflow slowed to a trickle. He looked speculatively from the shadows to the jumble of potions. "The green ones, yeah?"

"Mmm." A more articulate response lurked somewhere in Will's brain, but the analgesic properties of the antidote had already packed it snugly in wool. He let Bao support him as he turned his hand and watched the last drops of fluid glisten on his deflating palm.

Bao sighed. "Well, that's two who won't be keeping watch tonight."

"I'll be fine," Will said. Most of consonants cooperated. "Whoever takes first should keep an antidote on hand."

As generally happened when the issue of volunteering for the watch arose, Arik retreated to an earlier subject. "Didn't get this shit back in Coneria," he rasped, gnawing on a bone. "Y'know what else I miss? Imps. Get a damn good meal off an imp."

"I haven't had imp in years." Bao's voice was wistful enough to push Will from queasiness to full nausea. Wishing that the dullness in his limbs would affect his hearing instead, he rose up on his knees and accepted Bao's steadying arm as he made it the rest of the way to his feet.

Will nodded at her. "I'm going to sleep this off. Wake me if" he didn't quite stifle a yawn "you need me to take the watch."

Head sloshing, he let himself into the tent he shared with Mina. Near-darkness descended when he let the flap fall.

"Everyone's all right?" There was no mumbling, no rustling of a body fumbling into consciousness. "I heard something, but it sounded like you had it under control."

"Just a spider bite." Will compulsively rubbed his hand against his robe. "You can't sleep?"

"I'm not really tired. I'm just hiding from dinner."

Even in the firelight, Will had noticed the bruise-dark circles under her eyes. "Is it your Orb?"

She snorted. "I don't think it's fair to blame my Orb for that rabbit."

Mina seldom lied so much as she evaded, sprinkling crumbs of half-truths down the wrong paths. There was no point in cornering her just to watch her refuse to be diagnosed with a problem that she didn't want to have.

After wishing her a good night, Will tugged off his cloak and curled up beneath it on his bedroll, then drifted into nightmares of creatures that burrowed into his palms and devoured him from the inside out.

* * *

[Coneria, thirty-nine days before Midsummer]

The trick, Will had decided, was not to reflect. He hadn't slept the night before; even after he had retreated to other end of the shack, away from a conversation that was increasingly none of his business, he felt as if his insides had been replaced with taut, vibrating strings. Words that had no place in a city clinic, words with heavy vowels and audible capitalization, echoed inside his ears. He felt raw, as if something had cracked him open and left a void in his chest, and part of him ached to run naked into the storm and offer himself to the rain.

Instead he had locked himself in the storage room with a lantern and calmly filled a sack with various healing and purifying potions, trading a tally mark for each vial. When Bao called him out at dawn, he scribbled, "Gone to save world. Took some spare potions (recorded). Didn't tell high wizard, sorry" on a scrap of paper, left it as a bookmark in the inventory tome, locked the door to the shed behind him, and slipped his key into his rucksack without looking back.

That last step had probably been a mistake. He couldn't stop thinking about the key now.

"Here, watch this," said Arik, and with three words he arrested Will's thoughts in a way that the entire morning crowd at the gates had been unable to do. Adjusting the hood of his cloak so that it covered all his face but his mouth, he grabbed the arm of a passing child of indeterminate gender, then grinned down at it and rasped, "Boo."

The child ran off in a screaming panic. Bao crossed her arms and sighed. "Arik, that cloak is to _hide_ you."

"Thought we was tryin' t'get someone's attention."

"Yes, but not that sort of attention."

Will refrained from pointing out that a burly man in a black cloak could only attract the wrong sort of attention. By the time logistics had come up in the previous night's conversation, he had already begun drifting toward the storage room, and for all he knew the cloak was the best Bao was able to manage on an early-morning supply run. The disguise seemed unnecessarytying his bandanna several inches lower would have hidden Arik's new scarsbut Will hadn't even known that an entire bandit gang had been executed the day before, let alone whether Arik had achieved any sort of local notoriety. While Will's understanding of the legal system was hazy, he didn't suppose that surviving a hanging was grounds for a pardon.

A small pack of armed fighters roved nearby. Keeping an eye on their faces, Bao reached into her knapsack and withdrew one of the black Orbs, setting Will's brain abuzz until she secured the leather flap again. A small boy who had been watching the fighters clapped a hand to the back of his head and began to whine. The fighters themselves evinced no reaction.

"No good." Bao slipped the Orb into the pouch at her waist, at which point the little boy stopped rubbing his head and ran off toward the fruit vendor. "We had the same problem at the temple. The only other person who reacted to any of them was Master Xue, and he's so old now he'd be lucky to survive the voyage to Coneria."

Will had never seen an elderly monk before. He wondered if they cloistered themselves by choice, or if they found themselves hunted down and confined to their temples as soon as their hair ran gray. "So what causes a reaction?" he asked.

Glancing at the approaching fighters, Bao dropped her voice. "We're not sure. My order teaches that everyone is born with an elemental affinity, so it might just be a matter of how strong that affinity is, or the Orbs could be looking for qualities that"

Arik grinned. "Heh, she don't know."

"Well, you went and disproved that 'quality' idea all by yourself, youexcuse me." She took a few steps toward the fighters and said again, more loudly, "Excuse me! You're not going to the Temple of Fiends, are you?"

A stocky blond man at the head of the group halted, and his fellows followed suit. He eyed Bao with an exaggerated lack of regard. "Obviously."

"And not a mage among you," she said. "You do realize that the temple is crawling with undead?"

The leader flexed. "Dead, undead, it all stops moving when you hit it enough." As his companions laughed, he shot Bao a smug look and moved on.

She sighed. "At least I tried."

Arik elbowed her and whispered, "Tell 'em to take off their rings before they go in, yeah? Cuttin' off fingers is a right pain."

"Arik. No." Palming the Earth Orb, Bao resumed watching the crowd. Will watched a disheveled man, staggering and hiccupping his way through the gate, stop to twitch and slap at invisible irritants. She seemed to be ignoring that candidate.

A flash of color caught Will's eye, and he turned to see a lanky, fair-skinned red mage pause mid-strut and press a hand to her temple. The tattered hem of her cape and the battered feather in her hat suggested a level of activity to which most of Coneria's ostensible adventurers did not aspire. As she scanned the crowd, she caught Will staring and marched over to him.

"Good," said Bao under her breath. "This one's paying attention."

The red mage drew herself up in front of them, setting her hands on her hips. "Whatever you're doing to me, you'd better have a damn good excuse for it."

In answer, Bao opened her hands around the Orb, which drank the morning light and reflected nothing. The red mage bent toward it, her breathing shallow and her eyes unfocused, and extended her fingers as if there were hooks in her joints. The contact made her yelp.

As the red mage snapped out of her trance and slumped, shaking, against the wall, Will glanced around to see if the party had attracted any onlookers. Apparently, heated confrontations were nothing unusual for the crowd at the city gates, and with four lovers' quarrels and an increasingly belligerent episode of haggling taking place just within Will's earshot, any passers-by had better sources of entertainment than his party could provide. The haggling in particular threatened to erupt into airborne vegetables.

Will had heard Bao's spiel once already and had no desire to discover that it was, in fact, lunacy, so when he heard the opening notes, he opted to turn and watch the merchant involved in the price dispute ready an aerodynamic cantaloupe. "Here," Arik rasped into his ear, "bet you twenty he pulls a knife soon as he gets knocked in the head with that melon. Damn soft city boys ain't got no sense."

The customer's hand had already gone to his belt. "I don't have any money," Will pointed out. The merchant drew back his arm. "Er, should we do something about this?"

"Yeah, make sure that guard don't get interested over here."

Will followed the angle of Arik's thumb and saw one of the castle guards strolling up, sunlight glinting from his steel armor. The crowd parted for him, and in a single action he speared the merchant's cantaloupe and collared the customer. "Goddamned showoffs, all of 'em," Arik muttered as the guard's resonant voice threatened fines if certain actions were repeated. "They couldn't do that if they wasn't all armed."

Some things, Will decided, did not merit responses.

"Shit," said the red mage. She sounded more dazed than angry, but Will supposed that the anger was biding its time. As he had discovered the night before, a moment's contact with a resonating Orb was enough to bury all other emotions under a thin, bubbly layer of urgency. He was still waiting to feel properly upset.

Bao returned the Earth Orb to her knapsack, and the red mage's eyes unclouded, though her breathing remained uneven. She gave them a long look before saying, "Well, then. I'm Mina. Do you have names, or do you ambush people anonymously?"

"I don't _like_ her," said Arik, and the red mage started at the ragged whisper of his voice. He glared at her from under his hood.

"You'd better learn to." Bao's tone summarily executed that line of conversation and put nooses around the necks of all attendant thoughts. If Arik demurred, he did so too quietly for Will to hear. "I'm Bao, this hulking idiot is Arik, and our white mage is Will."

A reflexive "Nice to meet you" made it out before Mina caught herself, but she didn't issue a crankier follow-up. Her pupils were still dilated.

Bao smiled cautiously. "It's good that you're taking this well."

Mina shrugged. "It's been a slow season. If the princess hadn't gotten kidnapped, I'd be trying my luck in Pravoka by now." She frowned and drummed her fingers on the pommel of her sword. "I really _am_ taking this well."

"I think it's a side-effect of whatever enchantment is on the Orbs," said Bao, fount of speculative knowledge. "I wasn't worried at all until the morning I set out, and then I panicked for hours. All things in their time."

"Yeah, give it a bit," Arik advised, leaning back against the wall. His hood fell and obscured his face entirely. "Hit y'like a hangover."

Will's quiet dreadthat everything would eventually sink in and crack him opengrew a little quieter; he tended to work better with the inevitable than the unknown. For a moment he wondered if last night's abortive break-down would be the extent of his panic, but he doubted he could adjust as quickly as Arik had. Arik didn't have much of a paradigm to shift.

After wasting a warning look on the black hood, Bao turned back to the red mage and asked, "Do you need to put your affairs in order?"

Mina rolled her eyes. "You should work on your tone, unless you're trying to make this sound like a suicide mission. And the only affair I had was going off to save the princess. Isn't that why everyone's here?"

"Not directly, no. But we might as well get off on the right foot."

"Yeah?" Arik peered down at the red mage with relatively little misgiving. "So what's the reward?"

"Isn't one, officially. The king's waiting for some prophesied warriors or other to show up, but he won't turn down anyone who brings his daughter back."

Something fluttered in Will's throat. "Oh," he said weakly. "We're prophesied."

The beginning of a laugh twisted into a short, choked thing in Mina's throat. If her expression was any guide, her thoughts had just begun to rearrange themselves around the empty place carved out by her Orb. Will hoped she managed this stage at least as well as he had the night before; nothing good would follow if she started rolling naked in the dirt.

"We'd rather not stay the night in the city," said Bao, in a tone that did not invite discussion.

Mina didn't seem the type to require invitations, especially to welcome distractions. She blinked away the remaining fog in her eyes. "Oh? Well, no need to explain. I'm not allowed back into Crescent Lake, myself."

Will glanced from Bao to Arik; the former radiated quiet distress, while the latter tilted his hood back, grinned affably, and asked, "Y'get ratted out?"

"More or less. Some people just can't let anything end gracefully."

As Arik nodded, his initial reservations apparently forgotten, Bao let out a long sigh and turned to Will. "At least you won't be a problem anywhere."

"Actually," Will said, "I killed a man in Pravoka last summer."

Bao stared at him.

"I was joking."

"You don't do it very well." Without giving him a chance to reply, she turned and began to walk away from the city and out into the fields. "Let's not delay any longer." Arik detached himself from the wall and followed swiftly after.

The red mage hesitated, then muttered, "Oh, what the hell," adjusted the weight of her pack, and set off after Bao.

Will was moving before he was entirely aware that he had decided to do so, but most of his decisions in the past day had been made without his conscious input. He had just caught up with the rest of the group when his brain creaked. "Did I just run away from home?"

"Ah," said Arik with satisfaction. "_There_ it is."

* * *

[The Melmond marshes, four days before Midsummer]

Will awoke twice in the night to faint luminescence in the other half of tent. The first time he was so alarmed that he forgot himself and offered to help; the second time he stayed silent, listening to Mina curse under her breath as her magic fizzled out. A third time he woke to the sounds of her casting a sleeping spell over and over and pounding her fist against her bedroll when she remained awake.

When morning came, Will found her still awake and worrisomely ashen, even in the canvas-filtered light. Her skin, in the brief moment before she shook him off, felt cool and dry. "You're ill," he said, as she struggled to stand.

"No, really?" Mina raised her hand. At first Will couldn't tell what she wanted to show him, but then he noticed the faint glaze of white magic over her palm. The light evaporated before it became any brighter than phosphorous.

Taking it as permission, Will set his hand on the shoulder that had been wounded and let healing drip down through her tunic. She tore away from him with a gasp and grabbed the affected area.

"That shouldn't hurt," he said.

"I know." Mina hesitated, then tugged her neckline far enough to expose her injury. Bloodless and dry, it gaped in the depression just above her collar bone. It looked like a stab wound, Will noted, with tattered edges.

"It won't heal," she said, pulling her tunic back in place. "It stopped bleeding, but it won't close."

He was supposed to tell her what was wrong, in a friendly, efficient voice that would encourage her to accept medical assistance less grudgingly in the future, but his face probably gave him away even before he spoke. "I've never seen anything like this."

"Figures." She snorted and reached for the tent flap.

Worried that he had already exhausted her willingness to cooperate, Will hastened to add, "It could be poison."

"It could." Mina must have been in even worse shape than she was letting on; she let Will take her arm to help her outside.

In the sunlight, her pallor was so pronounced that all her blood appeared to have drained away from her skin. The skin under her eyes had gone a deep gray. "Stop staring at me," she muttered, shaking him off as she sat on ground. "Where are the potions?"

Apparently no other spiders had attacked in the night; no empty vials littered the campground, and someoneno doubt Baohad returned the heap of potions to the sack, which lay near where Arik and Bao were dismantling their tent.

"Mina's ill," Will said by way of explanation. He plucked an antidote from the bag.

Bao strode past him, leaving a complaining Arik to finish the work alone, and knelt beside Mina. "It's nothing serious, is it? You look terrible."

"Hmph." Mina batted away Bao's hand. "Give me that."

The latter statement was directed at Will, who uncorked the vial and pressed it carefully into Mina's hand. Her weak grip worried him, but she got the potion to her lips without spilling any. She took a tentative sip.

With a shriek Mina flung the vial away and began to convulse, her eyes bulging. Her hands flew up to claw at her throat. As Bao tried to restrain her, she retched the mouthful of green liquid and then collapsed, shaking.

"Shit," said Arik, near whom the vial had landed.

"Actually, that's almost what it's supposed to do." Will bent over the spilled potion and brought up a drop of with his finger to examine. "If there's no infection to force out, the body expels it."

After a moment's consideration, Will licked the droplet on his fingertip. Hair-thin, white-hot wires shot through his extremities and then came screaming back, burning his throat and mouth as he coughed up a ball of green-tinged saliva. "The potion's fine," he reported.

Bao glared up at him from where she was half-cradling Mina. "What have we discussed about testing your medicines on yourself?"

Ignoring her, Will went on, "So it's not poison or infection." He rifled through his sack less in search of anything specific than in hopes of finding inspiration. His potions were meant for conditions from which Mina manifestly did not suffer; had she been turning to stone or burning with fever, he would have been on firmer ground. "That doesn't eliminate curses. Whatever curses were on that plate"

"You can't do a damn thing about." Despite Bao's protests, Mina had half-sat up. Her hair formed a black curtain around her bowed head. "Help me get packed and we'll go."

Bao shook her head. "In your condition, you can't"

"Lottie, y'wake up stupid today?" Arik gestured at the cave entrance with one of the poles from his half-dismantled tent. "Got a sage right in there."

Her preferred nomenclature being a cause she had all but given up, Bao sighed and helped Mina to her feet. "I suppose that's our best bet, then."

Although they finished packing quickly, Mina's condition had so degenerated by the time they set out that she could no longer walk even with support. After several minutes of disagreement, she ended up draped unhappily over Arik's shoulders. Bao's promise to take turns with him did not improve her mood.

"Like I'm enjoyin' this," Arik muttered, stooping clear of a stalactite as he entered the cave. He shifted her weight and scowled. "An' quit goddamn _sniffin'_ me."

"I am not sniffing you." Mina's voice wasn't much louder or more civil than Arik's.

Will hefted his potion sack and followed.

* * *

The closest things Will knew to sages were high wizards, and he knew only one of those. The high wizard of the Conerian clinic lived in the wealthy district near the castle, wore wine-colored robes with elaborate white trim, and had probably never gone underground in his life. Unless Melmond's sage had gilded the interior of his cavern, Will didn't suppose sages and high wizards led terribly similar lifestyles.

What they did seem to have in common was a propensity to discourage visitors. The tunnel with the hungry guard-titan made a good analogue to the high wizard's terraced gardens stocked with trained wolves.

When the party at last arrived at what neat lines of pots suggested was the sage's actual dwelling-cave, Arik was still grumbling about the security. "I can't believe y'fed my ruby to a _rock_."

"It wasn't your ruby," Bao replied. From atop her shoulders, Mina made a noise that might have denoted agreement or a complaint about being scraped against the wall. "And if you want to hold the torch, you have to walk closer to me."

Arik pointedly did not. "Wouldn't be a problem if he had some lights or somethin'. Ain't he s'posed to be a sage? He ought t'have little fairies strung up on the walls."

While the world in Arik's head was no doubt a fascinating one, Will had no desire to explore it. He fell back, shifting the weight of his sack, and stooped to examine one of the clay pots. Even in the faint light of the increasingly distant torch, he could discern the shapes of the runes carved in rings around it. He couldn't read them, but he recognized a few characters from the high wizard's ceremonial staff.

"William!" called Bao, and he hurried to catch up again.

The party had rounded a corner and come to a wooden door set in the rock, under which seeped firelight. Before anyone could knock, the door creaked open, and a wizened, bearded face peered around it. "Ah, Light Warriors. I have been expecting you."

"Yeah?" said Arik, master diplomat. "So was your rock."

After shooting him a glare that might have killed a weaker man, Bao turned to the sage and made the best approximation of a bow that she could manage with Mina on her back. "I beg your pardon, Master Sarda. We found what we believe was your ruby, but I'm afraid it's no longer with us."

Arik scowled. "On account of she goddamn fed it to a goddamn _rock_."

Comprehension lit Sarda's face. "Oh, the titan, you mean? Impossible creature. I shall have another talk with it." Ignoring Arik's muttering, he held the door open and waved them toward the hearth at the other end of his room. "Come in."

As Bao entered, stooping to keep Mina's head away from the door frame, the joviality drained from Sarda's expression. "Is your companion ill?"

"No." Will discovered another thing sages had in common with high wizards; Sarda's full attention felt like a kick to the inner ear. "I mean, it's not a natural illness. I think she's cursed."

"The Earth Cave is thick with curses," said Sarda, following Bao as she carried Mina to the chair nearest the fire. Will noticed that he walked easily without a cane, despite the age carved deep into his face. "There are horrors in the depths undreamt of by those who walk in the sun."

"Wonderful," said Mina, who seemed to have rallied enough for sarcasm. Once Bao had gotten her upright in the seat, she braced herself against the armrests and shook off further offers of aid.

Out of the corner of his eye, Will saw Arik wander over to the mantel and the mélange of occult objects displayed atop it. Bao gestured sternly at him.

"First tell me," said Sarda, "what you encountered in the cave."

Arik started to say something about rubies before Bao elbowed him. "Mostly bugs and undead," she replied. "There were a few giants near the surface, and winged monsters made of stone."

"Gargoyles," said Will, whose formal education had asserted itself. "We found a plate covered with dark magic, and we're sure it's blocking the way to the Earth Fiend."

Bao nodded. "That was after we killed the vampire."

She started to elaborate, but Sarda waved her into silence and turned his attention to Mina. She winced when he set his hand on her face but didn't otherwise seem to have the energy to be a difficult patient.

"Cold as stone," he mused.

Mina glowered at him. "I don't feel cold."

Frowning, Sarda pulled down each of her lower eyelids, revealing conjunctiva the yellow-white of severe anemia. When he pulled down her lower lip, her gums appeared a bluish gray.

Will had seen patients with her coloring before. They tended not to be alive.

When Sarda reached for her hands, Mina pulled them back and said, "I can do it myself." With some help from her teeth, she managed to tug her gloves off, one at time. Her exposed fingernails were a chalky white.

Sarda pressed his fingers to her wrist, frowned, and leaned in to sniff her face. Mina drew back sharply and nearly fell from her seat. "Hmm," he said, ignoring her glassy-eyed glare. "Only one test remains." Without any further explanation, he released her arm and headed out into the cave proper.

As the door clicked shut behind him, Mina sank deeper into her chair, her breaths so shallow Will couldn't be certain that she was taking them. "He's crazy."

"Never met a sage who wasn't," said Bao.

"Too bad he ain't the funny kind of crazy." Arik drummed his fingers against the mantel. "Remember Ginny?"

"Yes. She bit me."

Will suspected that this story, like every other of Arik's, ended with some variation of "She's dead now, of course," so he moved in closer to Mina. She eyed him warily and said, "Don't touch me. I'm sick of it."

"I won't." A series of upsetting noises came from outside. After a glance at the closed door, Will asked, "How are you feeling?"

"I don't know." Mina's words ran together in little puffs of breath. "I can't feel anything."

In the background, Arik's anecdote stumbled toward a punchline, which was interrupted by creaking and clucking. Will turned to see Sarda standing in the doorway with both hands wrapped around an agitated chicken.

They stared in collective silence until Mina let out a weak, bitter laugh and said, "That's it, I'm going to die."

Sarda shook his head as he advanced toward her. "I fear you already have."

"Shit. Y'want to bite somebody, bite her." Arik jerked his thumb toward Bao. "She's used to it."

Ignoring him, Sarda held out the half-frantic chicken and said, "You must do exactly as I say, no matter how strange or repulsive you find my words. Let the consequences, whatever they may be, fall upon my shoulders."

While Mina's expression indicated that the sage had done nothing to convince her of his sagacity, her skin had gone ashen, and she slumped bonelessly in the chair. Even trembling seemed to require too much energy. If she had been deteriorating fast earlier, Will could describe her condition now as being in freefall.

Her pause might have been from hesitation, or perhaps the discovery that she was too weak to nod. "Fine."

With surprising dexterity, Sarda grabbed the chicken's legs in one hand and used the other to snap its neck. Bao ceased hovering anxiously at a distance and began hovering within an arm's length of Mina, where she watched as Sarda dropped the still-twitching bird into Mina's lap. "When I make the cut," he said, drawing a knife from beneath his robe, "you must drink the blood while it is still hot."

He gave her no chance to protest before opening the chicken's throat, spraying her upper body with crimson. Mina stared blankly at it. Before Will could move to assist, Sarda picked up the dead bird and pressed its wound to her lips. After a protracted moment, during which Arik offered his raspy but frank appraisals of Sarda's medical credentials, Mina closed her eyes and began to gulp. Her posture, Will noted with a chill, straightened with each swallow.

When Sarda pulled the chicken away from her, the slit in its throat was scarcely damp.

Mina blinked several times, stared at her right hand as she flexed it, and said, in a small, shallow voice, "Oh, God."

"I'm sorry." Sarda set the corpse of the chicken on a bare table, then turned and addressed Bao. "It is as I feared. Her flesh is cold, her blood stilled, her scent tainted with rot. She's a walking corpse, and no more human now than anything else you've killed."

Bao bristled. "Don't talk about her like she isn't here."

She and Sarda locked eyes. Neither backed down until Arik rapped his club against the wall and rasped, "Hey, what the bleedin' hell just happened?"

"Mina's infected," said Will. He felt stupid now for making assumptions; had the curses in the narrow passage been at fault, he would have been in worse shape than Mina. "The plate had nothing to do with it. The vampire bit her."

Muttering disjointed curses, Arik backed as far away from Mina as the wall allowed. She didn't seem to notice; she was using the edge of her cape to scrub at her face, which was already clear of blood.

"Correct," said Sarda, shifting his unwelcome attention to Will. "Without blood, a new vampire falls into torpor. If the creature survives, however, it will begin to adapt to its corruption. Soon the vampire loses all traces of its humanity and will gladly hunt and devour those it once loved."

"She's right here." Bao bared her teeth when she spoke. "Goddammit, you _talk_ to her."

Another pause settled in, longer and tenser. Sarda broke it with a sigh.

"Your dedication is admirable," he said, "but sadly misguided. Melmond has suffered from the curse since the first stirrings of the rot, and your tragedy is an echo of one that has played out since before any of you were born. There is no cure for vampirism."

The high wizard believed only in funded and documented cures, but Will had learned how to fix things halfwayruined hands that could still grip weakly, hearts that beat as long as they were kept from overexertion, crushed throats that admitted at least the ghost of a voice. His master liked to say that the limits of magic were invitations to try again from a different angle.

"We'll find one," said Will, with what he hoped was more confidence than he felt. Three days ago he hadn't even believed in vampires.

Bao nodded and curled her hand protectively over the back of Mina's chair. Mina let her cape fall and looked up with a start, parting her hair where it had fallen over her face. It was difficult to judge how frightened she was when her skin already looked like graven tallow.

"You do realize," said Sarda, "that the most sensible, and perhaps the kindest, course of action would be to slay her now."

Bao stepped forward, putting more of herself between him and Mina. "That won't happen."

"I see." He smiled thinly at her. "Well, I don't expect you've come this far by being sensible. How is Lukhan faring these days?"

Bao relaxed but did not remove her hand from the chair. "I couldn't say. He joined the Circle long before my time. They say he hasn't seen the outside world since the rot began."

Something shifted between them, as slight as a night breeze rustling a fallen leaf, and Sarda turned to the bookshelves lining the cavern walls. "Let it be on your heads, then," he said without rancor, "if you would take an old man's speculation over his experience."

Arik's club knocked against the wall again. "Ain't nobody asked me." Once he had commanded everyone's attention and Bao's special irritation, he shrugged. "She better not _sniff_ me, is all."

Unperturbed, Sarda ran a wrinkled hand along a row of books, stopping at a cracked leather cover. "Vampires," he said, taking the volume and beginning to page carefully through it, "are defined by their generations of removal from their source. One tradition holds that slaying a vampire nearer the source will release from the disease any that he infected. However..." Sarda paused to lick his finger and separate two stubborn pages. "This belief has never been proven true, to the grief of many an adventurer. If anything, the destruction of a vampire increases the vampiric powers of those he infected. Yet the legends remains with us, and what is a legend but truth told slanted?"

A lie, Will thought, or wishful thinking passed along as fact. He didn't like to consider too carefully the legend sleeping in Bao's pack.

Sarda pulled a red ribbon from the front of his book and laid it over his current page. "Something must lie at the center, some unholy womb that bears these monsters. As for this creature's identity, I ask you: What causes the rot? What turns our fields to fetid bogs?" Sarda snapped the book shut. "I can imagine no father of vampires but the very force that corrupted the power of Earth!"

Bao's face lit. "The Fiend."

Nodding, Sarda crossed the room and removed a slender, rune-engraved staff from its nonessential support role in a clothing rack. "This rod's touch will shatter the cursed plate," he said, proffering it to Bao. "Slaying the Fiend might restore her to life; it is equally likely to release her to a natural death. And there remains the risk that she will fill the vacuum created when the source is removed. Were a Light Warrior to become the dark mother of all vampires, or perhaps even replace the Fiend of Earth"

Bao took hold of the rod. "That won't happen."

"I pray not." The book he presented to Will, saying, "This journal contains all that I have learned and deduced about the rot. I have marked for you the section concerning vampirism, but read whatever other pages you wish. I keep no secrets from you."

As Will rearranged his pack to accommodate the volume, Sarda turned his attention to Mina. "As for you, your time is short. Men have been consumed by the curse in no more than three days, and I cannot say whether your connection to the Orb will impede or hasten the spread of the rot within you. Remember that you are better destroyed than corrupted."

That he had addressed Mina seemed to shake her out of her stupor. "I know that," she snapped. Her hands clenched into fists.

Sarda nodded coolly, without apology. "Take three of my chickens with you, but be sparing with them. Remain unaccustomed to blood for as long as your body is able."

Arik did the best he could to clear his throat. "So where's my present?"

Sarda turned and stroked his beard. "You may select the chickens." Without waiting for a response, he added, "Remain here until nightfall; you will find travel by day more trouble than it is worth. I shall prepare a room for you," and left.

As the door closed, Mina made a noise like a laugh and asked, staring at her hands, "So if it weren't for my Orb, would you have killed me?" The tremor in her lips belied her tone.

"Don't borrow trouble," said Bao. Her expression softened. "And of course not."

"Right, 'course not," Arik muttered, barely loud enough for Will to hear. "She's already a damned corpse."

Mina glared at him. "I'm dead, not deaf."

"Undead," said Will unthinkingly. He caught her expression and apologized.


	2. Chapter 2

[The Temple of Fiends, thirty-seven days before Midsummer]

The skeleton charging them collapsed, its bones wrapped in blue fire. Will's vision swam as he spun back to the battle in the center of the temple, where Bao and Arik circled Coneria's traitor knight, landing blows when they could and springing away before he could retaliate. It amazed Will that Garland could still fight, even sluggishly; Mina had already struck him twice with lightning.

Arik's club caught Garland in the back of the head, sending blood spattering from the front of the horned helmet. By the time the sword swung around, Arik had darted out of range, and Bao's foot slammed into the backs of Garland's knees, where his polyens offered no protection. Garland roared and managed to nick her thigh with his blade as he stumbled.

Will was almost glad of the minor injury; it distracted the part of him that could not bear to see bloodshed without attempting to stem it. Shaking off his exhaustionhow many undead _had_ he purified?he hurried over to her and pressed both hands against the wound. White light saturated her blood and then evaporated as her flesh knitted back together.

"Get back!" shouted Mina. Will turned to see Garland charging him, but he had no time to react before flames enveloped the black armor. Bao grabbed Will's arm and pulled him aside as the mass of burning metal lurched toward them, howling.

Arik's club smashed into Garland's ruined face and came away trailing fire and blood. In a series of horrible sounds and smells, Garland crumpled on the stone floor in the midst of the ashes of his cape. He was still twitching when Mina put her sword through the gap above his gorget.

Arik wheezed. "That was"

"Unnatural." Bao smoothed the torn fabric over her thigh. "He was completely deranged."

"I was _goin'_ t'say that was my kill."

"This conversation stops now." Kneeling beside the smoking corpse, Bao wrenched the helmet off and frowned at the ruin of Garland's face. "It's a terrible pity," she said as she rose. "He was a hero even when I was young."

Minds could break, Will knew, and magic had no dominion over them. Even spells that appeared to twist their victims' thoughts only projected illusions into the air, rendering the spells' effects less predictable than their names suggested. For all its inherent mystery, magic, once it left the hands of its caster, had all the ethereality of a hammer.

At the moment, he felt as if all his hammers were balanced precariously on their handles. Bao's free hand caught him after the first wobble.

"You're not in your clinic anymore," she said. "It isn't safe to push yourself so hard."

Will took careful breaths until the spots left his vision. "Next time I'll let the ghouls eat us."

"You should at least smile when you do that. You're unnerving when you try to make jokes." After a quick pat to test his stability, Bao let him stand on his own. "If no one else is falling over, let's find the princess."

"She must be back there." Mina tilted her head toward the far end of the room, which lay beyond the light of Garland's candelabra, and added, "Do you think Arik's scarier with or without the cloak?"

Arik had doffed the thing the moment the party was out of sight of Coneria and had not touched it since, though he subjected his companions to repeated variations on "Heh, did y'see that kid's face?" A bit of arranging would allow him to cover his face while displaying the bright scars on his throat, but Will suspected that the cloak would disappear before Arik had another chance to experiment with it.

Bao's twitch suggested that she had glimpsed a future filled with royal panic. "I think Arik will be keeping his distance."

As Arik began to argue, Mina focused a small fire spell in her hand and made her way across the room, flicking flames onto unlit wicks as she went. Bats fled in a leathery flurry as the light spread first over crumbling stones, then over twin rows of columns, and finally over a polished black altar, on which slumped a very pale girl who didn't look much older than Will.

"Your highness?" said Mina as the rest of the party moved to catch up with her.

The princess's head snapped up to stare at them with wide, bruise-ringed eyes. Her gown had been torn, exposing one of her shoulders where the cornsilk tangles of her hair didn't fall, and ropes bound her wrists to either side of the altar. Otherwise she seemed mostly unharmed, if unsteady. A circlet sat askew on her head; it appeared to be made of finger bones held together with human hair.

"You're safe now," said Bao, as Mina knelt to cut the ropes. "He's dead."

The only response was incredulous head-shaking. When Bao held out the helmet as proof, the princess went rigid, then burst into tears and threw her arms around the startled Mina.

"Shh." Mina removed the bone circlet and set her hand on the princess's shoulder. "Are you hurt?"

Taking deep, shaky breaths, the princessSara? Will had never been good at keeping up with the royal familystraightened and wiped her face with the remains of her sleeves. The redness in her eyes made her irises appear a piercingly bright green.

It took Will a moment to realize that she was trying to speak, and had likely been trying to scream during the fight. At his request, Bao brought him his sack, from which he withdrew a bottle of relaxant and a rag. The princess flinched as he daubed the potion over her throat, but the startled noise she made assured Will that he had been right in suspecting that a mute spell had paralyzed her vocal folds.

Mina tried again: "Did he hurt you?"

"Ihehe made me play the lute." Sara seemed to be having trouble adjusting to the sound of her own voice. She bit her lip and sniffled before continuing, "He'd untie my hands, and then he'd stand there and make me play it until my fingers hurt, and then he'd scream and tell me I wasn't doing it right, and when I cried he hit me." Blinking back further tears, she clasped her hands together in her lap and stared at them. "The others who came, hehe made that... that..."

She flinched as Mina held the circlet out to her and asked, "Do you want to bury it?" Sara squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. "Do you want to burn it?" When Sara shook her head again, Mina bent down and slid the grisly thing away into the shadows. "Then just forget about it. It's all right now."

For several seconds the princess kept her eyes closed and her hands clenched, during which time Will realized that he hadn't heard Arik say anything inappropriate yet. A quick survey of the visible portion of the room determined that both he and Bao had slipped away.

Concern over Arik's unsupervised activities was balanced out by the certainty that Bao would catch him, and both those thoughts diminished in the face of Will's growing need to eat something. He fished an apple from his sack, considered, and approached the altar with the fruit held out on his palm. "Are you hungry?"

When Sara opened her eyes and nodded, he set the apple in her cupped hands, then retrieved another for himself and sat down beside her. The princess swallowed a small mouthful before asking, "Are you the Light Warriors?"

"Apparently," said Mina, at the same time that Will said, "Oh, is that what we're called?"

They glanced at each other and shrugged.

Sara took another bite of her apple, then a deep breath. "The lute," she said, then hesitated. She took another breath. "Garland stole it when he kidnapped me. It's very valuable; it's been in my family for two thousand years, but it shows no signs of aging."

"Valuable?" Arik peered around a shadowed column. "Let's hear about that 'valuable' part, yeah? Everythin' else around here is junk, junk, an' more junk." To make his point, he tossed out something that proved, once it stopped rolling and clanging, to be a dented iron helmet.

Bao appeared from behind him and reproachfully picked up the helmet. "A little respect for the dead wouldn't hurt, you know."

"Don't recall gettin' much respect when _I_ was dead." Before Bao had finished correcting him on points of both respect and actual deadness, he approached the altar and loomed over Sara with too much eagerness to be menacing. "Right. Valuable?"

Aside from a startle when the helmet clattered to the floor, Sara seemed to have settled now into a regal calm, perhaps having decided that nothing could compare to several days spent staring into the abyss that was Garland. She returned Arik's look without a hint of trepidation. "It's in a chest behind the altar. I think he kept it locked."

"Not a problem," he replied, striding off into the shadows with his club hefted. The splintering crash of wood against metal followed.

"You never learned how to pick locks, did you?" Bao called over the noise.

Abruptly the banging ceased, and the new silence was broken by the creak of hinges. Arik returned a moment later holding his quarry by its fretted neck, as if it were a strangled chicken. "What the hell is this?"

"A lute," said Mina.

"Goddammit."

While Bao rescued the instrument from his irritation, Sara said, unfazed, "You should keep it. If you're the Light Warriors of legend, then we have been guarding it all this time only to give it to you."

"Then we're finished here." Bao slung the lute over her shoulder and inclined her head toward the exit. "Let's get you home."

"Wait." Mina sat beside the princess and set a gentle hand on her arm. "She's still injured."

During the hike to the temple, Will had seen Mina cast curative spells only twice, and neither had been for anything more serious than a shallow cut. When he started toward the princess to see if he was needed, Bao caught the hood of his robe and whispered, "Let her."

"But"

"You look like you're one spell away from passing out."

This point Will conceded. He watched as Mina removed her gloves and began to fuss over the abrasions on the princess's wrists, applying white magic with her fingers as if it were a salve. Her thumb continued to stroke Sara's palm even after the light had faded.

Arik made the broken panting sound that he had begun substituting for laughter. "Bad as Desh. Y'remember Desh, yeah?"

"I do. What ever happened to him?"

"Swung with the rest of us." Arik didn't emphasize the final word, but Bao flinched at it regardless. If he noticed, he didn't react; his attention was focused on Mina's mending work, which had moved on to Sara's eyes. Hints of bruises remained after the magic evaporated, but Will supposed that the discoloration might have been from exhaustion. She took much longer than should have been necessary to heal the princess's split lower lip.

When Sara stood, holding on to Mina's arm for support, the party discovered that she was barefoot. After a brief discussion, during which Bao pointed out that she was carrying both a large helmet and a musical instrument, the princess found herself taking a piggyback ride on Arik as the party emerged into the sunlight and headed south.

Once they were safely out of range of even the most persistent undead, Will paced himself at Bao's side and asked, "What did you mean about Desh?"

She peered down at him thoughtfully. "How old are you?"

"Almost fourteen."

Her lips quirked upward. "I'll tell you when you're older."

* * *

[The Melmond marshes, three days before Midsummer]

At Sarda's suggestion, they waited until nightfall to depart. The marshes, dark and treacherous under a thin crescent moon, posed no navigational challenges for Mina, and she seemed eager to scout ahead of the rest of the party, out of range of any conversation. When the horizon began to lighten, she slowed, and the rest of the party caught up with her as the red sun dragged itself out of the sea.

By daylight her skin was the waxy green-gray of a corpse.

Even with her cape and hat to shield her from the sun, Mina couldn't move faster than a crawl. Bao erected a tent around her and sent Arik off to see about gathering dry brush for a fire, leaving Will to his own devices. He updated his potions inventory, fretted, and turned his attention to the first page of Sarda's journal.

The text fluctuated between the personal and the technical, with notes about a trial-and-error approach to animal husbandry scrawled in the margins of lectures about magical theory. About a quarter of the way through, organization prevailed, and all subsequent entries revolved around difficulties in farming; Will guessed that Sarda had begun to keep multiple journals. Several pages later, Sarda had written, "Decay is natural, but this is decay without rebirth. In the south the fires burn even after they have consumed. In the north, no calm follows the storm."

Every page that followed catalogued the rot. Will read bits of it out loud to Bao as she set up the other tent, until she cut him off with a faintly irritable "I can _see_ that."

He hesitated, then closed the journal and said, "We have another problem."

"When don't we?" Bao set down the rope she was tying and sighed. "I apologize. I'm a bit on edge."

Rejecting absurd responses like "Don't worry" and "It's all right," Will picked up his inventory sheet. "We'll be going even deeper into the Earth Cave this time, and we used more healing potions on the last trip than I have left. We'll have to go back to Melmond to get more. I can't get the ingredients I need from the marshes."

Bao abandoned the half-skeleton of the tent and sat down opposite him. "And we won't be able to count on Mina for healing."

Will nodded. While they had earlier waited, too agitated to sleep, for the sun to set, he and Bao had read through the section of the journal relevant to vampirism. One of the more upsetting anecdotes involved Melmond's wizard, who survived the attack on his clinic because the vampire, acting on some animal whim, opted to infect rather than devour him. When he later turned up half-mad in the town square, his robe stained with blood and his flesh branded with the shapes of the clinic's holy items, he had raved before he was slain: "It is gone, it is gone; God has forsaken; it no longer burns."

Already Mina's white magic had diminished to a pale, powerless sheen that transpired as soon as it appeared. Will hoped that her indifference to religion would spare her at least the madness.

"We can't take her back to town, either," Bao added, picking at something on her sandal. "If she lost control of herself in Melmond, I..." Whatever she had been scratching lost her interest; her fingers dug into the ruined earth and came away with a handful of dust, which crumbled in her fist. "Why don't I know what to do?"

Because no one knew what to do, Will thought, but he hadn't managed to put that into less bleak terms before Arik returned, bearing withered firewood, and said, "We get t'eat a chicken, yeah?"

Bao's head snapped up. As Arik repeated his query about the poultry, she rose and gave him the sort of look Will applied to innovative potion formulas. "Arik," she said, too intently to have intended the word as a greeting.

"Hell no."

"I haven't even asked"

"Don't matter." Arik stooped and began making a bed for the fire. "You got that look."

"Just listen to me. This is serious."

He snorted. "What ain't, lately?"

Closing her eyes, Bao flared as her nostrils as she took a series of deep, controlled breaths. "Listen," she said. "Someone needs to run back to Melmond for supplies. We don't have enough to survive another trip into the Earth Cave."

"Yeah?" Arik stood. "Make Will do it."

Bao crossed her arms. "I am not sending a thirteen-year-old boy alone through the marshes."

Will would have preferred a reason that had more to do with his magical abilities, but Arik had already moved on to a new tactic: "So how come _you_ don't go?"

"Because _you_ don't have a decade of training in non-lethal combat." Cutting off an argument that "non-lethal" meant not aiming for the face, she set her hand on his arm and said, "Arik, please. I can't leave Will alone with her. If you leave soon, you can be back before nightfall tomorrow. We'll send you with potions." She locked eyes with him for a moment, then let her hand fall. "You can have a chicken."

Arik sighed. "Yeah, all right. Better be the fat one."

Over his objections, Bao took the chicken to Mina's tent first, shook her out of her torpor, and fed her the blood. Even in the protective shadow of the tent, Mina was too groggy to do more than swallow. Her breath stank of rot.

"There's no sense in wasting it," Bao said as Arik grouchily cleaned the bird. "I don't want her to wake up hungry, and this saves you some work, doesn't it?"

Arik removed a handful of organs with unnecessary force. "Like t'see your face when we all wake up vampired."

"According to this" Will held up Sarda's journal "that happens only with a direct bite. Whatever causes the infection can't survive in dead blood or open air."

"An' how's he know?"

Sarda's later accounts of vampire slaying were interspersed with notes about the properties of vampiric bodies, most notably the discovery that hair shed by a vampire turned to ash when the creature itself was destroyed. Earlier entries contained nothing so academic. When the first vampires began to plague Melmond, Sarda recorded pages of mangled emotional reactions, broken up by gaps in the journal's binding. "I came here because I did not want to watch the world die" had been etched so deeply into one of the missing pages that it left ghosts two leaves deep.

Eventually the writing became less faded, the commentary pithier, and the eulogies terser. The last full page contained only a handful of names and the observation that beheading alone was enough to destroy a vampire, though it was exceedingly difficult to behead one that had not first been paralyzed with a stake to the heart.

"I think he knows," said Bao. "If there were any such thing as second-hand vampirism, Sarda would have eaten us."

Mumbling something about sages and tricky bastards, Arik jammed a skewer through the chicken. Will scooted back to give him space. If even the chance to cook proper meat couldn't soothe Arik's nerves, the only safe place to be was out of range of the knives and dried peppers. Will tore a blank page from his own journal and began a shopping list.

Over the clatter of various spice jars, Arik said, "Ought t'start takin' along some of them pirates. Let them run the damn errands."

"That wouldn't be fair to them," Bao replied. "They've been a good crew; they haven't even complained much about Melmond. After this is over"

Assuming they all survived, Will thought. Arik gave voice to it: "Yeah, if we ain't all dead."

"We're not going to die." Sometimes Bao sounded like a high wizard, as if she expected her words to make reality apologize and rush off to reshape itself. "After this is over, we should let them choose where we go to recover."

"Hmph." After a short pause, filled with little gusts of breath and the scraping of flint against steel, Arik seemed to have lost interest in pessimism. "Well, Pravoka ain't too bad."

"Actually," said Bao, "I think they'll want Elfland. They liked the elves."

Before leaving Coneria, Will had seen elves only rarely and in passing, as they never came to his clinic. In Elfland he learned why: their pulses were slower, their blood green, and their reactions to medicines distinct from those of humans. Will spent the party's entire sojourn in the city scribbling notes in the clinic, until Bao carried him forcibly to the inn and told him that she would not have him passing out from exhaustion in the Marsh Cave. She later confiscated the potions Will had bought, ignoring his protests that he didn't intend to test all of them on himself.

"Think we got somethin' wrong with our pirates," Arik muttered.

The conversation could only degenerate from there, so Will blocked it out and set about translating his labels into pictographs. By the time the bird was cooked, he had translated his list into variously literal symbols, applied the same to a set of potion samples, and packed everything carefully into Arik's knapsack. He asked Arik to repeat his instructions until Arik jammed a large piece of chicken into Will's mouth, but a scalded tongue was better than leaving room for improvisation.

"You don't want to sleep first?" Bao said as Arik rose and slung the sack over his shoulder.

He shrugged. "Slept yesterday while you was up worryin'."

As he turned to go, she hurried to her feet and set her hand on his shoulder. "Be careful."

"_You_ be careful. I ain't the one with the vampire."

She remained standing, squinting into the low sun, until he faded into the landscape. When she sat again, she said nothing and cut the rest of her food into tattered ribbons.

"He'll be fine," said Will.

"Of course. That's why he's half-mute and Mina's undead." Causation and the remains of a thigh suffered together in silence. "You go ahead and sleep first. I wouldn't be able to."

Out of habit Will headed for the tent he shared with Mina, only to catch himself mid-way and turn, with some reluctance, toward Bao's. As much as he doubted the wisdom of sequestering himself with a vampire who might, chicken or no, wake up hungry, he had grown up with certain ideas of personal boundaries, and he understood nearly half the jokes Mina made about the party's sleeping arrangements. Bao and Arik were tangible in their absence; Will felt like an intruder even on his own bedroll. He fell asleep curled small in the corner.

* * *

Shrieking woke him. Will leapt up and ran, stumbling, out of the tent, leaving his robe behind.

Not far from his tent the last of the twilight illuminated Bao, who had, with difficulty, pinned Mina to the ground. For a wrenching second Will thought that Mina had succumbed to the curse, but when she tore one of her hands free, she brought it up to gouge at her own face. Her eyes rolled up inside their lids.

Will had to shout to be heard: "She's losing her magic?"

Mina screamed like a dying rabbit and drove her knee into Bao's gut. Wincing, Bao shifted her weight to restrain Mina's legs and managed a winded affirmation.

"What can we do?"

"Keep her from killing herself."

As much as his hands ached to mend, to soothe pain and siphon poison, he remembered how Mina had jerked away when he tried to heal her. His gentlest light became fire, melting the flesh it sought to knit together. This was the rot, ineluctable and implacable, corrupting any efforts at salvage. Sarda had written of corn that sloughed to nothing at harvest, grown in fields that sank deeper into bogs with each tilling.

Mina's cries split the air. Flexing his hands, Will hovered as near as he could without coming into range of her thrashing limbs and said, uselessly, "Watch out for her teeth." He didn't blame Bao for failing to respond.

Overhead the moon rose like a slow bubble in a darkening pool. Will stared at it and clutched his sleeves, fighting the impulse to scratch open his arm and create a problem that he could solve. His hands itched.

When the screams suddenly muffled, he turned his attention back to Bao, who had wrestled Mina face-down in the ruined earth and pinioned her arms behind her back. The spasms subsided, leaving Mina retching and whimpering. Half-breathless herself, Bao murmured gentle lies: "It's all right. It's all right. Let it go. You don't need it."

After what felt to Will like far longer than the angle of the moon indicated, Mina drew an empty, rattling breath to croak, "It's gone."

Bao released her after a moment's hesitation. Rejecting Bao's proffered hand, Mina wobbled upright and then stood unsteadily, her clothing caked with dirt and her eyes strangely bright and blank in the starlight. Like a cat's, Will thought. He tried not to connect them to the twin gleams that had heralded the party's failure to sneak up on the Earth Cave's vampire.

"Are you hurt?" asked Bao, and Will hurried over to inspect her, ignoring the corpse-stench that clung to her from her contact with Mina. He slathered enough magic on a small bruise to seal a spurting artery.

In the corner of his vision, he watched Mina's hair undulate around her shoulders despite the lack of any breeze. Her mouth twisted into something halfway between a sneer and a scowl, then fell flat as she turned away. "I don't want to talk."

Bao sighed quietly and wiped the excess glow from her arm, rubbing it between her fingers until it faded. Restless, Will glanced around until his gaze fell on Mina's hat, which had landed upside-down in the ashes during the earlier scuffle. He had started to move for it when Mina let out a sharp hiss.

Her teeth glinted bone-white and jagged. "Did you hear that?"

A cackle burst from the desiccated bracken around the campsite. Before Will could react, the sound echoed out in a line, overlapping itself in waves.

"Hyenas." Bao had already dropped into a fighting stance. "Will, stay behind me!"

Shadows flickered over Mina's back, divorced from the influence of the moonlight. She strode forward, arms spread, and said, "Don't breathe."

Will had seen her cast bane spells before, but the poison cloud that began to spread from her hands now was so dense that it appeared viscous. She severed the magic and stepped back, head cocked in confusion, as the glob of darkness oozed forward like a levitating slug. "Huh," Mina said, and Will caught himself before he began to worry; it wasn't as if the toxins could damage dead lungs.

When the spell reached the thicket, the cackling dissolved into sticky coughs and shrill gurgles. The hyenas, like every other creature managing to eke out an existence in the marshes, seldom succumbed to poison, but discomfort tended to scatter them. They preferred prey well past the point of fighting back, and they no longer minded the taste of decay.

So Will felt no shame about hiding behind Bao when what should have become the sound of a fast retreat remained a cacophony of wet hacks and unsteady but advancing steps. The hyenas' eyes shone yellow as they staggered through the bracken.

"Shit." Mina drew back alongside Bao and raised her hands again. A rusty glow seeped through her gloves.

Bao stopped her with a sharp command: "Don't. You're likely to blast us all to pieces." With a nod at Will, she added, "Cover me."

Her first kick launched the nearest hyena backward and filled the air with the crack of bone. A growl rippled through the beasts' ranks, and their slaver-coated teeth gleamed as they turned collectively toward Bao. Careful to avoid hitting Mina, Will sent an experimental arc of purification magic into their midst and discovered that the hyenas' behavior could not be attributed to undeath.

A hiss tore itself from Mina's mouth. The hyenas froze silently in place, eyes wide and tongues lolling. "Stop it!" she barked in a voice that vibrated in Will's bones. "Get out of here. Get out!"

The beasts darted abruptly back into the night, leaving their wounded companion whimpering where it had fallen. When Mina approached, it flattened its ears and yowled, tipping its head back to expose its throat. She locked eyes with it for several seconds, then curled back her lips and pounced. A horrible, ecstatic trill rose from one of their throats.

"Holy God," Bao breathed.

They had only two chickens left. Will found it impossible to concentrate on anything else.

The hyena's body hit the ground and rolled once, its throat black. Mina remained hunched, her shoulders shaking, her hair coiling over her face. In the absolute silence that had fallen over the marshes, Will could hear the whisper of liquid dripping over leather.

"How did you do that?" When Mina didn't answer, Bao rounded on Will. "How did she do that?"

Before he could confess his ignorance, Mina laughed brittlely and swayed to her feet. "That won't be in the book," she said, folding her arms together against her chest. Blood streaked her chin. "I doubt Sarda asked the other vampires for demonstrations before he killed them."

Arik was not there to point out that vampires were, in point of fact, already dead, so Mina wiped her mouth and continued uninterrupted: "I don't know how, either. I felt drunk. I still feel drunk. There's something inside them that's dying, just like the earth, and I" She turned her head away; her hair whipped out of proportion with her movements and out of touch with gravity. "Everything's dying but me."

When she remained silent for several seconds, Bao retrieved Mina's hat from where it had fallen and brushed the dirt from it. Mina accepted it wordlessly.

"We'll fix this," said Bao. Will wished that he had never noticed the inverse relationship between the firmness of her tone and the level of her control.

Mina turned her hat over in her hands, her gloves glistening in wet patches where the moonlight struck. "I don't think you want me keeping watch," she said dully. "I'll be back before dawn." Without waiting for a response, she vanished silently into the dark. The lack of any paired gleams in the shadows suggested that she had not looked back.

A stinking breeze stirred the ashes. Bao knelt beside the dead hyena and, after a long silence, asked, "Did you see her teeth?"

In flashes only, but Will had seen enough to know that they came to irregular points, giving her a mouth like the rim of a broken bottle. He nodded.

Bao sighed and rubbed her temples. "We'll be damned lucky if we get three days."

"I don't want to talk about that." Will's voice sounded childish to his own ears, but an unseasonable chill had suffused the air and reminded him how of far he was from home. He wanted a fire even as he doubted a fire would help.

His shivering must have been apparent; Bao left the corpse and began stacking together tinder with some of the leftover firewood. After a few tries, the spark from her flint caught, and she blew gently on the nascent flame. Will sat beside her and hugged his knees to his chest.

"If you're cold," said Bao, "you should get your robe."

Will shrugged. The night hung precariously around him, and some part of him was convinced that the fire was the only light left in the world, and the crackling of wood the only sound. If he moved, he risked shattering what little shielded him from the void.

Bao didn't seem inclined to move, either, and he wondered if Mina's affliction had seeped into the other Orbs, or perhaps triggered sympathy pains. Decay crept through him, consumption without comprehension, leaving behind scraps that were no longer alive but could not pass on into death. Turning his head slowly enough to keep the world balanced, Will peered at the hyena's corpse and found he could not remember whether Sarda had written about non-humanoid vampires.

"It's dead." Bao snapped a dry twig and drew Will's attention back. "We should still burn it."

Her voice broke the spell, and the void was only sky. Will tensed his muscles until he was certain that no rot had taken hold inside him. After a steadying breath, he asked, "You're not going to make us eat it, are you?"

"No." She strained for levity. "Arik took the spices."

In the firelight, Will could read the exhaustion in her face and body. Her lower eyelids would have appeared bruised by day. "You should sleep," he said. "I can keep watch."

"I can't sleep." But she did rise and head for her tent, returning a moment later with Will's robe. She draped it over his shoulders and settled cross-legged beside him. Neither made a move for the hyena. When the fire began to dwindle, Bao fed it another log, which she poked methodically with a long stick.

"Shh," she said, though Will hadn't spoken. "It'll be dawn soon."

* * *

[Pravoka, twenty-four days before Midsummer]

Bao relaxed against the ship's railing, her hair loose around her shoulders and her uniform tugged open far enough to expose the white cloth that she used to wrap her chest. Even in the moonlight, her cheeks and nose were visibly flushed.

When Will approached, she grinned at him and slurred, "Hey, there. Arik's lookin' for more rum. You like rum?"

"You're drunk" didn't strike him as a productive statement, so he tried, "Isn't your order supposed to abstain?"

"Just the young ones. Once your belt's black, what you abstain from is between you an' your conscience. Right now, my conscience ain't sayin' much."

That her diction kept sliding closer to Arik's distressed him. Abandoning tact, Will asked, "Do you really think it's a good idea to be drinking right now?"

"You worried about the crew?" Bao snorted. "They took over Pravoka just on noise. You saw Bikke, how he crumpled like somebody who's takin' off that fake eye patch now and thinkin' it's time to go home and be a baker like Mom wanted. They're all like that. They're just glad they still got a ship to crew."

One of the crew in question scurried past and did something inscrutable to one of the sails. As far as Will could tell, he didn't seem perturbed by the change in management, but Will's expertise lay in reading bodies rather than the personalities that animated them.

Bao waved and got a salute in return. "See?" she said to Will. "They're decent." Before he could reply, she gave him an earnest frown and added, "Arik's decent, too, deep down. Or maybe I'm the one ain't changed."

The ship listed gently. Will used the excuse to break eye contact as he steadied himself.

With no sign of expecting a response, Bao turned to rest her forearms on the rail and stare out over the darkened water. "Couldn't take it back now if I wanted," she said with a low sigh. "No sense dwellin' on it, and anyway they wouldn't've chose me if I was goin' to choose wrong. I told you that, right?"

"Told me what?"

She smiled askance. "That it was just me. Orbs didn't want nobody but me." She laced her fingers together. "I still wonder if I'm bein' punished."

Bao remained quiet for so long that Will turned to slip away. He hesitated when she said, "Anyway, he's decent," but she seemed to be addressing the ocean, her eyes misty.

Deciding that an intoxicated Arik was more than he wished to deal with, Will crossed the deck to the relative safety of the captain's cabin. Another of the sailors waved to him on the way; Will recognized him as the one who had suffered five cracked ribs, all courtesy of Bao's foot. He had been an easier post-battle patient than any of the group that Mina blasted with a confusion spell. Trying to disinfect and close scimitar wounds on men who still saw the world through a veil of fanged illusions was a professional challenge that Will did not care to face again.

Faint music carried through the cabin door. Will lifted the latch as unobtrusively as he could and slipped inside, where he found Mina sitting alone on the bed, strumming the lute. When she heard Will approach, she nodded at him and continued playing.

Music had never been part of Will's curriculum, but he liked the tune and waited until the strings were still to say, "I didn't know you played."

Mina smiled. "Well, those lessons in high culture were good for _something_."

Will's experience with high culture was limited to the knowledge that a finishing school existed near his clinic and that groups of identically dressed girls with books on their heads sometimes emerged from it. On one occasion a girl of about his age had waved furtively to him over the fence and offered to give him a kiss in exchange for a bottle of wine. When Will declined, she threw a shoe at his head.

"It's the whole red mage philosophy," Mina said, brushing a loose lock of hair back over her shoulder. "You go into it knowing you'll be mixing magic lessons with vigorous outdoor exercise, but most people are a little surprised when they find out about the sewing and calligraphy."

Will frowned and helped himself to Bikke's old armchair. "Doesn't that spread you a little thin?"

"Being a red mage isn't about specializing, though most of us develop a preference. It's about being able to handle whatever life throws at you. My order's motto is 'Multis pedibus sto.'"

Most of what Will knew about academic language was that it failed to interest him as much as cataloguing potions. "You do something with a lot of feet?"

"Stand on them." Mina stretched out the hand that had been strumming the lute, calling enough white magic into it to make her palm glisten. "See? I can't do any of those complicated spells that black mages lock themselves away to study, but I can heal my own scrapes and I don't get winded after a few minutes of running."

"And the calligraphy?"

"Damned if I know. Mine's terrible."

She reached for a canteen on the stand beside her and made a face as she sipped the contents. Will supposed that he was the only Light Warrior who would wake up tomorrow without a headache.

"I'm not usually this chatty," said Mina, unnecessarily. She had shared more about herself in the last ten minutes than she had in the entire week that the party had spent waiting for the Conerian bridge to be finished. "You have this, I don't know, _face_ that makes me think it's all right to tell you things. Is that a professional skill, or did I lose track of the rum?"

Considering that she seemed to be having some trouble focusing her eyes, Will guessed the latter. He shrugged politely.

She took another drink and said, "Go on, ask me another question."

Something important came to mind. "Why aren't you allowed back in Crescent Lake?"

"Ha. All right." Mina smiled crookedly and capped the canteen. "I exaggerated a little; they're not exactly setting a guard for me at the gate. Anyway, you know how... Actually, I suppose you're too young for people to be lying to you about being married. Point is, sometimes they turn out to be married to governors." She shrugged and went back to playing the lute. "It was a dead town, anyway. Nothing but old men sitting around waiting."

Will sat listening a while longer, until his eyelids grew heavy. As he rose to head for his makeshift bed in the corner, the deck rocked beneath him, and shouts burst outside the door.

The lute-playing stopped. Mina sighed and, with some swaying, got to her feet. Will moved to support her, but she shook him off, staggered to the exit, and peered outside. "It's one of those eye-things," she said, raising a hand that had already begun to glow a dim red.

Before Will could stop her, she shot a bolt of dark magic outside and smiled with satisfaction. "And now it's not a very _fast_damn. Well, it wears off."

Will maneuvered around her enough to see one of the sailors writhing in protracted displeasure as he was doused with vitreous humor. His efforts to avoid it played out in slow motion long after he was already drenched.

"Is anyone hurt?" Will called as the deflated remains of the monster splatted on the deck. Apart from the spell's victim, who yowled in sostenuto irritation, the sailors collectively replied that they could kill twenty more of the things before breakfast. Will wondered where Bao and Arik had gone, and whether it was normal for pirates to be so upbeat.

"I should finish the rum now," said Mina, wandering back to the bed, "so that doesn't happen again."

Will fell asleep to the sound of fumbled chords.

The next morning, as he investigated the effects of sea water on traditionally freshwater potions, Bao approached him with careful, deliberate dignity and asked, "Do you have anything for a hangover?" When Will shook his head, she frowned. "You're not being prudish, are you?"

"Hardly. My order makes wine. There are just some things you can't fix with spells and herbs."

She rubbed her forehead and sighed. "I hope Arik enjoyed himself last night," she muttered as she crept back toward the darkness of the berth, "because that will never happen again."

* * *

[The Melmond marshes, two days before Midsummer]

True to her word, Mina returned as soon as the darkness on the horizon began to diffuse. Will smelled her before he caught sight of her feral-swift shadow and glinting eyes; during the short summer night, the whiff of decay that clung to her had putrefied into the same stench that pervaded the Earth Cave.

Beside him, Bao stirred from where she had dozed off sitting up, and wrinkled her nose. Mina ignored them both as she darted, cape fluttering crazily in the moonlight, into her tent.

"I hope she hasn't fed again," Bao said quietly. "How much blood is in a hyena?"

Despite his exhaustion, Will perked up at the chance to be useful. Slotting the formula into place in his head, he asked, "How much did it weigh?"

Bao stared at him for a moment before rubbing her forehead. "Never mind. I forgot you might know."

When the sun finally appeared, she slouched with relief and gave Will an apologetic look, saying, "I have to sleep. Will you be all right?"

Day and night had fallen out of step; Will's body wasn't sure what dawn meant anymore but seemed prepared to accept wakefulness. He glanced at Mina's tent, which was bathed in paralyzing sunlight. "I think so."

Left alone, Will opened Sarda's journal and found himself facing an echo of "I came here because I did not want to watch the world die." He abandoned the book in favor of his potions inventory and the increasingly pessimistic notes he had made about the local flora. Even if he couldn't brew the medicines necessary for surviving the Earth Cave, he had empty vials and emptier hours to fill.

By midday he had made half a dozen attempts at doing something constructive with the withered vegetation, only one of which resulted in a concoction that didn't smell completely vile. It did, however, melt the twig that Will used to stir it. He resolved not to tell Bao.

Sarda's journal contained a fair number of blank pages near the back, he discovered. Exhaustion precluded any serious internal debate. With only a slight transgressive twinge, Will began ineloquently to describe the change in Mina's magic and her dominion over the hyenas. He tried not to wonder whether the vampire in the Earth Cave had exhibited similar powers.

He was counting his potions for the eighteenth time when heavy footsteps and clattering glass alerted him to Arik's return.

Bao shot out of her tent in a blue-and-brown blur. As much as Will suspected that it would be polite to stand back while she half-tackled Arik in greeting, he didn't want to hear his vials crushed under the force of affection. He hurried over to claim the sack, started to ask whether Arik needed any medical treatment, and decided that the man wasn't behaving as if he were in any acute physical distress.

Arik's hand caught his wrist. "Oh, no, y'don't. Got some of m'own stuff in there, too." Whatever he said next was muffled by Bao's mouth, so Will opted to back quietly away until they disengaged.

When Bao released him, Arik clapped her fondly on the back before saying, "So, yeah, did your damn shoppin'. And picked up a little" he pulled from his sack a length of hemp strung with white bulbs "garlic." After knotting the rope around his waist, he set his arms defiantly akimbo. "Smell that, yeah? No vampire gets _my_ blood."

"Arik," Bao began, but he had the advantage of momentum.

"Got me this, too," he said, producing a glass bottle sealed with a cork and filled with transparent liquid. Will couldn't think of any colorless potions, but Arik pre-emptively answered his question: "Holy water."

With a long sigh, Bao gestured back the way he had come. "You can't possibly have gotten it blessed here, not with the Clinic destroyed. Someone just sold you a bottle of well water."

"Sold?" At Bao's look, Arik amended, "Yeah, sold, right. But we got our own blessin' right here."

It took Will a moment to realize that the statement was directed at him. "Sorry, I can't bless anything. I'm just a novice, remember?"

"That don't matter." Arik held the bottle of entirely secular water in front of Will's face and sloshed it. "Just go on and, y'know, ask God real nice."

The rustle of paper saved him. "Listen," said Bao, glaring over the top of Sarda's journal. "'Tradition notwithstanding, garlic produces no adverse effects upon the vampire.'" Her finger flitted down the page, and she added, "'The efficacy of blessed water is less certain, but"

"I'm wearin' the damn garlic," Arik snapped.

Bao set down the journal, then rose up on her toes to whisper in his ear.

Arik's fingers nimbly unknotted his new belt. "I'm wearin' the garlic _later_."

They ducked together into their tent, whereupon Will hastily relocated to the opposite end of the camp. After rooting around in his pile of cork stoppers, he found a pair suitable for plugging his ears.

He didn't look up from his potions work until the sun had sunk more than halfway down the western sky. Finding Arik out of the tent, fully if sloppily clothed and contentedly whittling little blocks of wood, persuaded Will to pop the corks out. As Will watched, he lifted one of the finished products, bored a hole in it with his knife, and threaded a piece of twine through it.

"If you wanted a pretty necklace," said Bao, sidling up to him, "you should have asked me back in Elfland."

"You're a right jester, ain't you?" Arik added another heart to the twine without glancing up at her. "I'm makin' m'self a _holy relic_. For t'ward off vampires, see?"

"Mmm." Bao inclined her head at the other tent. "Have you checked whether the vampire is warded by it?"

Will set down his potions to watch.

After sliding a few more beads into place, Arik made his way to the tent and expressed his hope that Mina was awake, along with his intention to induce a state of wakefulness if necessary. With his free hand he lifted the flap, in the shadow of which shone a pair of yellow slits. Nothing else of Mina's face was visible between the brim of her hat and her cape.

Her voice came out as something halfway between a croak and a hiss: "What is it?"

Arik's fist shot out to within inches of her face, the necklace chattering from his fingers. Her eyes narrowed with languid irritation.

"Aw, shit." Arik shook the beads again. "Get back, foul beast! I rerewhat the hell"

"Rebuke," Will supplied.

"Right, rebuke you! With a relic! Burnin' with holy... rebuke!"

Mina blew the nearest bead out of her face with a burst of reeking breath. As Arik jumped back, she blinked and said, "You woke me up for this?"

Arik rattled the necklace sullenly. "Ain't like y'can sleep, anyway."

"It's called _torpor_, you stupid bastard."

The flap dropped back into place.

* * *

Will woke in the dark to the sound of Arik's snoring, uncertain when he'd fallen asleep and how he'd ended up inside a tent. When he slipped out, mindful of Arik's splayed limbs, he found the sun gone and Bao packing up the other tent. Vials gleamed around an open sack; on reflection, Will decided that he had passed out on top of his potions.

"You push yourself too hard," she said. "Arik, too. We need more rest, but we're running out of time."

A foul wind stirred around Will, bearing the scent of exhumed corpses, as Mina flitted in front of him. The yellow glint in her eyes could no longer pass for reflected light. Her voice came from the bottom of her throat, carried on breath that made him gag: "I could be there before moonrise."

Bao stopped packing to shake her head. "Don't. Stay with us unless it's so close to dawn you have to run ahead."

As Will knelt to pack his possessions, a reeking hiss compelled him to filter his breath through his sleeve. Mina paced in flickers at the corners of his eyes, vanishing between blinks, until Bao went to wake Arik. Will thought better of complaining that he felt sick.

Shadows fluttered past him. "I need some air," Mina said, and Will, engrossed in a quick check of his potions, nodded. As he tied his sack closed, he recalled that she no longer needed anything of the sort.

He found her standing blade-straight atop a barren knoll just outside the camp. Despite the night's stillness, her robes and hair undulated, their shadows out of sync with the moonlight. Her eyes gleamed gold as she fixed her stare on him.

"I can hear them," she said, inclining her head toward the southern hills. "They want me to run with them."

Her voice was distant and her cadence unnatural. Steeling himself, Will climbed up beside her. "You won't, of course."

"Right." Mina averted her gaze, letting strands of hair curl over her face. For a dizzy moment, Will imagined that they turned to ink and spread over her body, melting her. "They would never let me come back."

From the distance came the wild laughter of hyenas. Will shivered. "We should go," he said. "I'm sure Arik is"

Mina's hand shot out, quick and pale as light on water, and caught his robe. His heartbeat stuttered. "It's not just them," she whispered, her breath cool and rotten. "I hear _him_, too, under the earth. I can scarcely feel the Orb anymore."

Her mouth was much too close to Will's throat. "Don't listen to him," he said, shaking her off as politely as he could. Although he knew, logically, that she could still close the gap in a blink, his survival instinct demanded that he back away a step before asking, "What's he saying?"

She stared down at him, her expression hidden in darkness and eyeshine, and finally said, "He's trying to seduce me."

Will's imagination excused itself. "Um?"

"Well, it's not working." The shadows shifted enough to show her wry smile. "He's evil and undead, and that's three marks against him upfront."

"Three?"

"_He_."

"Oh," said Will, as several small mysteries resolved themselves.

Mina drew breath for a half-annoyed, half-amused sigh, but all the levity had already drained from her tone when she said, "And he's promising me things that II can't even describe them. The earth is sinking around me, and everything is dyingnot dead, just dying foreverand when they pray for oblivion, I force their bones to dance." Her eyes closed, leaving her face a blank expanse of shadows. "And I don't hate it."

A foul breeze tugged at her hat; tendrils of hair curled up to hold it in place. Will resisted the urge to back away farther as he said, "It's not your fault."

Her eyes hung in the dark like a pair of lanterns. "Yes, it _is_. Why do you think the vampire bit me?"

Because she had been nearest, Will thought, and the only one still fighting. When he tried to answer aloud, Mina cut him off: "I'm selfish. If I weren't, I would have made you kill me as soon as we knew. The entire world is damned if we're wrong. And I don't even care anymore. I just don't want to die." She turned her face away. "It's devouring me, and I still want to scream when I think about losing it."

"Mina, none of this is your fault." The writhing darkness did not respond. "Any one of us could"

Her hair twisted into coils. "Why the hell didn't you kill me?"

"You're our friend," Will said, and her shoulders hunched. After a long silence, she straightened and turned.

"I'm sorry." Mina's eyelids drooped as her hair began to slacken. "I justI don't know. I'm no good at this." She took enough of a breath to sigh. "Give me a moment. You won't tell them about this, will you?"

Will's master took issues of confidentiality so seriously that he had on occasion butted heads with the high wizard. "Of course not."

A thin smile twitched her lips. "Just a moment," she said quietly, turning her back to him. Her posture suggested that she had wrapped her arms around herself.

When Mina returned with him to camp, the desperation in her face had been tucked away somewhere less embarrassing, and she picked a fight with Arik over who had to carry the chicken sack. In the distance the hyenas cackled.


	3. Chapter 3

[The Northwest Castle, eighteen days before Midsummer]

"Where is my crown, vagrants?"

The king's voice echoed in the remains of the throne room, disturbing a layer of bats that spiraled up like a smoke plume through a hole in the ceiling. He leaned forward, gold rings clinking, as Arik pulled the crown out of his pack.

"Got it right here." Arik rolled the crown down his forearm and caught it around his finger, to the palpable displeasure of the king. "Pretty, ain't it? I like the opals."

"Especially the big one in front," said Mina. She ran her finger over the gemstone in question. "I couldn't help but notice how much it looks like the legendary Tear of Bahamut. But I must be mistaken, of course. What would a long-lost treasure of Cardia be doing all the way down here?"

Bao's elbow prodded Will. "Remember this next time you want to abstain from voting," she whispered. "Remember the _posturing_."

The king's eyes narrowed to slits, and his words came out threaded with hisses: "The crown is mine."

"Of course." Mina bowed with a flourish of her cape. "I wouldn't dream of insinuating anything."

Bao sighed and muttered something Will couldn't quite catch.

"One more thing, though," said Arik, setting the crown askew on his head. "What'd you say you was king of?" When the king's face contorted with rage, he grinned. "Yeah, figured. Lottie, y'owe me—whassat?" 

An ember-red glow began to spread over the king's hands.

Mina scoffed. "Don't be stupid. You're outnumbered."

Too late Will began to cast a silencing spell. He hadn't even pulled it into his palms before the king spread his fingers and sent threads of darkness snaking between them. They wove together, shiver-quick, to blast toward Bao.

She shifted, and the spell flew wide of her shoulder.

"Will, I want him silenced!" The king's body flickered red. "Mina, get h—"

Bao cut off mid-syllable as the spell pierced her back. In bloodless silence, its threads bored through her chest and emerged dripping with pale light. They vanished the instant she collapsed.

Will leapt to her side, feeling frantically for a pulse while the king's screeching laughter resounded throughout the ruins. He glanced up to watch the king's body melt and twist into a gangling green shape, which sprang off the throne in a confusion of overlong limbs.

"You fools!" The creature cackled again and took an ill-aimed swipe at Arik. "King, indeed! Astos, King of the Dark Elves! Give me the crown!"

Mina's ice spell caught him in the back. He hissed and lunged at her, coming up short when she brandished her sword.

Instead of running to help, Arik gave Will a desperate look and rasped, "Is she—"

"She'll be fine." Will swallowed his panic; Bao's heart remained still despite the short bursts of magic he fed into her chest.

"She don't _look_—"

"Just go!"

After another moment's hesitation, Arik hefted his club. He turned to charge just as a green cloud enveloped Mina.

"Shit," she hissed, staggering, as her sword slipped from her hand to clatter harmlessly at Astos's feet. Her face hit the stone floor with a wet crack.

Just a broken nose, Will decided. Taking a deep breath, he dug his fingers into Bao's chest and forced every speck of magic he could gather into his hands. His pulse buzzed. For a protracted moment, he felt as if he were being torn apart in the center of a storm. Every tap shattered his bones—

The connection snapped. Panting, Will collapsed forward and landed with his face against Bao's shoulder. Something warm trickled down his upper lip; he sniffed and wiped a line of blood against her tunic.

Shaking, he fumbled a hand to her throat and pressed his fingers to the vein. A faint, irregular throbbing pressed back.

Somewhere to his left a battle raged. Will groaned and tried to sit up, but gravity had him pinned. Fighting to remain conscious, he stared at spilt-ink patterns of Mina's hair until she began to stir. Thick but spirited cursing assured him that she wasn't seriously injured, and the heavy thumping of a club suggested that Arik hadn't fallen, either.

Beneath his fingers, Bao's pulse began to steady. A distant cracking sound suggested more ice magic. "Sorry about the mute spell," Will mumbled into her neck. Unconsciousness took him gently by the hand and began to tug.

There came a series of horrible sounds, followed by sirocco-voiced profanity that chased unconsciousness away. Wearily, Will raised his head enough to watch Arik, still crowned, stomp over with green ichor dripping from most of his upper body. "She damn well _better_ be fine."

"Don't move her yet." Will could barely hear himself; his breaths had better things to do than carry his voice. "I think I need to pass out for a few minutes."

"Go righd ahead. I can figz dis." Blood caked Mina's face from her chin to her nostrils. As Will watched, she cupped a handful of white magic over her swollen nose and managed to get it back to its original size, albeit slightly crooked. "God, that hurt."

Satisfied that no one was going to die on his watch, Will let his eyelids fall. Something like "What, y'just going t'sleep on her?" registered faintly in his ears before he sank below the level of sound.

* * *

When he woke, the first thing Will noticed was that his pillow was no longer Bao-shaped. A headache asserted itself a moment later, followed by acute hunger. He cracked open his eyes to find that he lay on a bedroll near one of the old castle's fireplaces, in which burned a low fire that Arik was poking with a stick. Will fumbled his way into sitting.

"'A few minutes,' my ass," said Arik, without turning around. "Hope y'like cold bat."

"Excuse him." Bao's voice drew Will's attention to the area just behind him, where she sat propped against the wall amid a double share of blankets. Mina lay on her stomach nearby, sifting through a pile of dusty trinkets. "Mina decided to tell him what a rub spell does."

Mina wiped a tarnished ring and snorted. "I didn't realize we were keeping it a secret. Besides, you'd think he'd be kissing Will's feet instead of sulking."

"I ain't kissin' nobody's feet." Scowling, Arik held out a lump of dark meat on a wooden skewer. "This one's still warm."

Bat was far from Arik's most horrifying meal idea, and it was certainly better than the "enchanted" Elvish bread that had gone stale and bitter after a day's travel. Will thanked him and took a bite from what looked least like a wing.

"For a king," said Mina, "he didn't have much treasure on him. Just the crystal, really, and that's Matoya's."

"Don't have to be," Arik muttered.

Bao coughed. "We've discussed this, Arik."

"What, so she can hex us soon as we hand it over?" He looked up from the fire with hooded eyes. "We need t'stop doin' favors."

There was a heavy pause before Bao said, crisply, "Lucky for you the rest of us don't think that way. More bat, William?"

He licked the grease from his lips and shook his head. While bat tasted better than creep (and every other meal that had been prefaced with "Look, it's meat, ain't it?"), Will would not have described it favorably outside of that comparative context. He nibbled on a bit more of the skin.

Silence settled back in until Arik sighed and resumed poking the fire. "From now on, I'm stabbin' everybody t'make sure they bleed right."

"Oh, hush," said Mina. "No one died. Not permanently, anyway."

The conversation never recovered.

* * *

[The Earth Cave, Midsummer's Eve]

Dawn leeched the darkness from the horizon. Mina became a smear of ink against it as she darted ahead, trailing rot and tattered shadows. 

The rest of the party arrived with the sunrise to find her crouched in the darkness of the cave's entrance, noisily worrying the neck of the last chicken. 

No one spoke until Arik opened his mouth, whereupon Bao preemptively hushed him and asked, "Are you finished?" in strained tones. 

Mina's head snapped up with the chicken still caught in her mouth. For a long moment she stared with eyes like polished coins, then let the bird fall. Feathers poked out between her teeth. "Yesss," she replied, in a long hiss that expelled blood-darkened plumage from her lips.

"Shit," Arik rasped. "She's goin' t'eat us, ain't she?"

It was impossible now to track Mina's movements; she hunched low to the ground, she stood in swirls of shadow, and there was nothing in between. Will's eyes watered trying to make sense of her. "Only if you keep wasting time," she said, sounding very nearly human again, before vanishing without transition into the deeper dark.

"The rest of us need a torch," Bao called after her.

A spurt of flame blasted Will's night vision, then vanished abruptly as Mina cursed. Through the spots in front of his eyes, he could just make out that she was struggling to remove her glove. Among her incoherent noises he heard the word "burns." 

Every other undead creature had recoiled from fire and burned like dry grass. Why should it matter if the fire came from inside?

Will dispersed the healing magic that gathered automatically in his palm and tried to help pull the glove off. Mina pushed him away. Feeling useless, he watched as the leather at last peeled free with a faint trail of smoke. Mina's flesh had shrunk back from her nails, giving them the look of claws, and the pads of her fingers were scorched.

"Arik, get out the flint," said Bao. As he rummaged in his sack, she turned to Will. "Is there anything—"

"I'd make it worse."

An icicle caught enough of the predawn light to glisten before Mina's hand closed over it. Her unnecessary breaths came rapid and hoarse.

Torchlight washed her with red but had little impact on her shadows. "Come on," she said, in a tone falling ever lower in her throat. "We can't waste time."

They were scarcely underground before the monstrous denizens of the Earth Cave began to stir in the darkness beyond the torchlight. Bao pushed the torch into Will's hands and dropped into a defensive stance while Arik raised his club; Mina turned, eyes and teeth mirror-bright, and said, "Wait."

She turned away to growl long and low, the vibrations of her throat echoing as little quakes in the walls. The ground at her feet churned as dozens of giant centipedes burst through the soil to writhe at her feet. The flickering light made madness of their legs.

Arik leapt backward. "Not helpin'!"

"_Wait_." Mina's voice was utterly inhuman again, woven from sounds better suited to hyenas and snakes. Locks of her hair twitched like insect legs. With a sharp hiss, she gestured down the tunnel, and the centipedes skittered ahead out of sight.

She slumped, hands on her knees. Had she needed to breathe, Will suspected she would have been panting. "Nothing should bother us now," she said.

Bao's posture remained wary. "And you?"

"I'm fine. For now. Your hearts are loud." Mina straightened and vanished into the dark, adding, "Don't touch me."

Creatures that had once clogged the passes now burrowed clear of the path as Mina approached, then flooded out again in her wake to stare after her with gleaming eyes. Will was forced to follow much closer than his senses of smell and safety wished.

"She'd be damn useful if she wasn't goin' t'rip our throats out," Arik muttered, his voice somewhat more muffled than usual as he filtered his breathes through his bandanna. "An' if she didn't stink like a goddamn shithouse."

"I can hear you," she growled. A centipede poked out of the ceiling and rattled its legs.

"Yeah, I know. With your vampire ears." He eyed the now-empty area where the party had nearly been overwhelmed by mossy-skinned giants. "I went all the way t'Melmond an' back for nothin', looks like."

Bao frowned at him. "Don't jinx us."

When they reached the vampire's lair, they found it unchanged: trophies still cluttered every available surface, and ashes still coated the floor of the vestibule. Mina darted past them in shadowy distortions that made Will's eyes water.

"Don't linger," said Bao, as if anyone needed to be told.

Arik harrumphed. "Yeah, don't let her get comfy here."

The darkness ahead hissed.

At the edge of the room, the torchlight fell on Mina huddled in on herself, shaking, half-hidden by the inky spill of her hair. She breathed with a frantic, broken rhythm, as if struggling to remember how. Sounds turned feral in her throat.

Bao reached out and set a hand on her shoulder, which seized up at the touch. "Fight it," she said firmly. "You're better than this."

Without warning, Mina thrust out her arms and sprang back. Only Bao's reflexes kept her from being knocked flat, and she caught herself in a crouch as Mina shouted, "I'm not! I want—I want—"

Gripping his club, Arik took a step toward her but halted when Bao caught his eye and shook her head. She got to her feet slowly but without any sign of injury.

"I want," Mina said again, lips curled back from her teeth. "I want—"

She seemed stuck on the words, so Will offered, "Not what he wants."

Mina shuddered, stilled, deflated. After a long pause, she drew a breath as if she meant to speak, but it emerged ragged and voiceless. Will counted his own heartbeats until she said, "We're wasting time," then darted into the next room.

Bao sighed. "She's right. The plate's ahead."

As they passed through the doorway, Will slowed and passed the torch back to Bao. "I don't want to get close to it again."

"Of course." Holding out the rod, she strained for levity: "Arik, you'll enjoy this."

Arik accepted and twirled it overhead. "Damn right I will." With Bao carrying the torch beside him, he approached the plate, raised the rod, and froze, with the look of one presented with an unwanted puzzle.

After taking a step back, he eyed Will and asked, "Why the hell is it buzzin'?"

"You've got some kind of magical aptitude." Mina's voice, mostly lucid, carried out of the darkness behind Will. When he turned, he could see her eyes blazing brighter than the torch, near enough to the ground that she must have been crouched. Light growls vibrated on the ends of her breaths, but she otherwise sounded almost herself as she added, "Shockingly. A black mage could tell you how that sort of thing works, but my studies focused more making fireballs come out of my hands." 

Arik regarded his palm with quiet fascination. "So how do I get 'em out of _my_ hands?"

"You don't. Here, let's trade." Bao swapped the torch for the rod, then brought the latter down on the plate with a grunt of effort.

The shattering echoed inside Will and knocked him on his backside. Foul air rushed past and through him, leaving him retching. When the worst of the feeling had passed, he raised a shaking hand to wipe a trickle of blood from his nose.

"Don't feel so good," Arik muttered. Bao patted him on the back and retrieved the torch before helping Will to his feet.

Several feet away, Mina hunched over with her hands pressed to her head. Her hair undulated wildly. "He's down there," she managed, then made a gurgling noise that had no business coming from a human mouth. "I hear him. He's inside my head and I can't shut him out."

"You _can_." Bao started toward her but halted when Mina's hair burst like a dying star. "It's your head. Fight back."

"_Don't._" Mina's voice was so near a feral growl that Will might have only imagined the word in it. "I will rip you apart."

Another gurgle spiraled upward into a howl that sounded as if it were tearing strips from her throat. The torchlight bounced as Bao retreated, and Will's stomach lurched with it.

"Don't y'dare eat us." Arik still sounded a bit woozy. "I'm wearin' the garlic."

The howl unwound. After a cough and a whimper, Mina fell silent, her body a shivering blotch against the wall.

When he was reasonably certain he wouldn't vomit, Will asked, "Are you all right?"

From beneath the space where the plate had been came a curious rumbling. Will scarcely had time to work out that it didn't sound like a cave-in before bats exploded upward in a leathery geyser, mingled with flashes of feathers. He hit the ground and couldn't see whether the others had done so as well.

When the din faded, the darkness remained; the torch had gone out. "Hello?" Will called.

"Lottie?" Arik's hoarse rasp came from nearby; a moment's groping brought Will's hand in contact with what was probably his shoulder. 

"The torch," said Will. As he and Arik fumbled for it, the sickly glow of Mina's eyes lighted their way. She hovered in silence as they struck fire from flint.

They found Bao near the plate, frozen halfway to a crouch with her arms rising defensively toward her face. It was an awkward posture to maintain; even before Will's eyes adjusted to the light, he had no doubt that she had been petrified.

Arik grasped her gray arm and said in tones of rising panic, "Y'can fix this, right?"

"Of course." Some of Coneria's nobles kept cockatrices for pets, though usually not for very long. "I brought seventeen softening potions."

Mina's eyes gleamed at them from the penumbrae, shadows flickering in her animate hair. "I'll get one," she said, then scurried like a spider to the sack. Will half-expected her to leave stains, red and white and black as a gaping mouth, but the potion that she pressed into his hand remained a pale blue, and its accompanying rag grew no filthier. Her skin chilled where it brushed against his.

"Make sure it ain't got _vampire_ in it now," said Arik, earning himself an angry hiss.

Ignoring them both, Will turned to the statue of Bao and uncorked the vial carefully; he'd seen what happened when a softening potion was spilled on skin that did not require further softness. He shook a few drops at a time onto the rag, which he then rubbed against Bao's pulse points.

"Now we wait," he said, introducing the vial and rag to a new home under the dirt. The ground above them bubbled. "She'll probably be a little stiff for a while."

Arik leaned in with the torch, squinting at the places where color had already begun to seep back into the stone. "Ain't right," he mused, "people gettin' turned into rocks. Dunno why she give up the woods for this shit."

Will shrugged and leaned back against the earthen wall after making a quick centipede check. "Well, I _liked_ working at the clinic, but here I am. I don't think the Orbs gave any of us much of a choice."

"Huh. Just tickled a little, is all." Arik scratched his beard thoughtfully. "She up and left before that, though. Took off with that monk like she was too good for us."

"Yes, I wonder why anyone would pick an education and regular meals over attacking travelers for money."

"I'm sayin'." Arik looked unironically wistful. "Damn, I miss it. Some of those fat bastards, you show ‘em a knife and they straight-out piss themselves."

The pace at which color had begun to suffuse Bao's limbs and face suggested that she would remain lifeless for longer than Will wanted to discuss Arik's former profession. Glancing about for a change of subject, he realized that Mina's gilt-moon eyes were nowhere in sight. He interrupted an off-color anecdote by calling, "Mina? Where are you?"

A pair of glowing slits appeared down the passageway from the direction they had entered. There came a guttural sound as if a wolf were trying to speak, then a pause. When Mina answered, her voice was low and jagged: "Hungry."

"Well, shit." Arik abandoned conversation in favor of sulking at Bao's feet, eyes fixed on the slow creep of color into her body.

After several long seconds' hesitation, Will stepped into the shadows, toward Mina. Her eyes narrowed further, but she didn't move. "How many did you eat?" he asked.

"Not enough." There was still something thick in her voice. "I can feel the ashes inside me. I can hear your blood flowing."

"More blood won't help," he pointed out.

"I know. I can't—I can't—" Her eyes snapped shut, then opened wide and round. "Don't come any closer."

Will settled in beside Arik counted potions until he could pretend to feel soothed by it.

When Bao's first trembling gasp broke the silence, he and Arik began massaging feeling back into her skin. "Cockatrice, I think," Will said in response to her confused noises. "It petrified you."

Her voice came out in a gravelly croak. "All I remember is an eye."

"Just quit dyin'," Arik told her, a little too forcefully for banter. "You're gettin' too far ahead of me."

"Technically," Will began, but Bao and Arik clung together in a way that suggested they weren't interested in the finer points of clinical death. 

Somewhere behind him, Mina cleared her throat wetly. "We should hurry. It's not getting any better." Will tried not to imagine her surrounded by the desiccated corpses of bats.

"We should." Bao shook out her limbs, then took back the torch and advanced on the darkness below the plate. "Follow me."

The hole beneath opened at an angle that allowed them to half-slide down the fetid earth until the tunnel leveled out into a wide passage. Their wariness proved unwarranted; nothing else flew or crept at them.

Mina brought up the rear like an elongated shadow, her stench carrying over that of the dirt. When she blinked, she disappeared into the darkness. "Thisss way," she hissed when they reached a crossroads. Blackness shaped the torchlight into a beam down one of the tunnels.

Arik shivered. "Almost liked it better when she was sniffin' me." 

"If you sense the Fiend," said Bao, "you should lead."

After a moment's hesitation, the darkness broke into pieces that scattered like bats. Mina's moon-eyes shone from somewhere ahead. She regarded the others long past the point of discomfort before backing away from them in flashes.

Skittering noises came from the walls, out of range of the torchlight. Will couldn't help noticing that he heard no footsteps from Mina's direction. After a long series of twisting tunnels, she halted again and said in a voice distorted by tremors, "He's below. I can feel him. Everything else is dying."

Bao approached, but Mina flitted backward away from the light. "Then let's change that."

"I—everything—" The quaking in Mina's voice dragged her words down into gurgling incoherence. After a sharp inhalation, she tried again, almost steadily: "Everything is dying. Do you understand? I can feel you dying."

There was a pause until Arik said, "Well, _yeah_." 

Bao nodded. "That's the usual trade-off for living." She softened her tone as she added, "We're all born and we all die, and it would be worse if we didn't."

"We try to put off the dying, though." Will fidgeted under the gazes of those who had never quite understood that he operated on the material side of the divine. "Well, we do."

The lights of Mina's eyes vanished, and Will couldn't tell whether she had blinked or turned her back on him. "I could stop it," she said dully. "I could hold you at the edge of death and never let you fall."

Arik started an indignant response, but Bao shushed him.

Hisses ebbing and flowing between her words, Mina continued, "I won't. He's _twisting_ it. Do you understand? Before, adventuring parties never worked well for me. They always ended with someone stealing the treasure and running."

There was a short pause, during which she breathed loudly and irregularly in imitation of life. "I'm sorry," Will ventured.

"Don't be; usually it was me." Her eyes opened like gibbous moons. "And then you didn't kill me even when you should have, and I've never—I don't want you to die." Bao was two syllables into a response when Mina's voice dropped to a growl: "I want to eat you alive."

Her eyes dropped down through the floor. Will followed Bao forward and watched the torchlight fall on another slope leading deeper into the earth. Somewhere below, he could hear Mina forcing herself to breathe.

"She goin' t'eat us if we go down there?" Arik asked.

Mina's voice shuddered at the end of "I'm not getting any less likely to."

They descended. As soon as Bao's feet rested on level ground, the foul air stirred as if the cave itself had sighed, blowing out the torch. Arik muttered and made clattering noises probably related to retrieving the flint. The darkness blanketed them; it took Will a moment to realize that it shouldn't have been absolute, not with Mina nearby.

The air stirred again, so thick with decay he nearly gagged, along the side of his neck. And again, louder. A sniff.

His legs tensed to run, even as he knew he wouldn't make it a step. Instead he tried to will his heartbeats quieter as he said, "Not so close, please."

A broken, startled laugh puffed against his cheek. Mina moved so fast that he didn't register her absence until he heard something shriek and gurgle in the shadows. Another bat, maybe, or a bird. He wondered if the blood of cockatrices tasted like stone.

The torch flared to life. Its light etched shadows deep into the lines of Bao's face. "No more blood, Mina. You're drinking seawater."

Mina's eyes gleamed open as she licked her lips loudly. "I'm so dry. I'm all ashes. And you're sacks of blood, sloshing around—"

"I ain't sloshin' nowhere," Arik huffed. He had the most blood of any of them, unless Bao had spent a significant amount of time training on mountain peaks, but Will elected not to point this out.

Bao stood firm. "Don't think about our blood. Just lead us to the Fiend so we can get your blood back."

In reply came a long hiss. As it faded, something thumped against the ground with enough heft to suggest it hadn't been drained dry. A blink later, Mina was on the other side of the passage, beacon-eyes wide, backing into the darkness. Twice she stopped to close her eyes and growl, until the rest of the party coaxed her on. "He's close," she kept saying. "Like sand in my head."

At last she stopped moving. When Bao approached, her torchlight illuminated ancient-looking stone doors, before which Mina crouched in a swirl of shadows. Her hair and hat obscured her face. The imperfect seal of the doors let an oily stench leak out into the air, sicker and stronger than the stink of vampires or rotten fruit or old corpses bloating in the sun. Like gangrenous flesh suppurating, or the remnants of a stillbirth gone septic in the womb.

"He's in the ashes inside me." Mina clenched her fists rhythmically, gaze fixed on the motion. It was still strange to see her bare hands, and stranger still to see them dead-white and nearly clawed. "He would take the place of a heart."

"It won't come to that." Bao stood before the doors, a respectful distance from Mina, and let the torch illuminate the geometric carvings in the stone. Shadows cut deep between them at unsettling angles. "Will, silence the Fiend if you can, and focus on offense; we can't afford a protracted fight. Arik, charge—"

"'Cause that worked so well last—"

"While I come around and flank him," Bao continued smoothly. "Just keep him occupied and don't make eye contact. Mina, strike hard and fast with whatever hurts him most. If we lose the light again, you're the only one who can see. We're depending on you."

The noise that rattled out of Mina sounded almost like one of her laughs. She rose in flickers of motion that defied anatomy. "I know. I hope my feet are strong enough to support you."

Will remembered her red-cheeked and wistfully chatty. "You can stand on our feet, too," he offered. It was impossible to tell whether she smiled, but the shadows on her face seemed to soften. 

"That," said Arik, "is a goddamn stupid way t'fight."

Bao gave him a fleeting smile. "I'm almost certain that was metaphorical. Let's try not to trip each other. Are we ready?"

The doors groaned inward under Mina's hands. To Will's surprise, the cavern beyond them was illuminated: stalactite-shaped candelabras held not candles but pale, naked flames suspended in glass. These ringed a stone altar, at the base of which lay a glass ball large enough to contain Will and churning inside with bruise-colored gases.

Arik thumped his club against his palm. "The hell am I s'posed t'charge?"

Mina hissed at the ball like an angry cat. The sound moved deeper into her throat, down into undulating growls that kept time with the pulsing of the gasses. As she crouched, hands digging into the ruined earth and head shaking violently, the ball cracked like an egg and poured its contents upward into the air. Will gagged on the stench coating his breath.

From behind him, Bao threw the torch into the rising gasses. Sickly green flames licked down into the ball until the gasses turned suddenly solid, snuffing the fire and shattering the glass. The earth shuddered. With a defiant howl, Mina straightened up and bared the jagged rows of her teeth.

The shape congealed from the gasses was nearly humanoid—white bones and violet robes, with no flesh between them. Pinprick lights gleamed in the empty sockets of the horned skull, the same crimson as the magic gathering like missing tendons between the metacarpal bones.

There was no point in trying to silence the Fiend; he had no throat to constrict. Will poured his energy instead into a purification spell, which wound itself through the Fiend's exposed ribs like a serpent. It took the Fiend only a moment to dispel it, but in that moment, the glow around his skeletal hands faded, and Arik's club connected with his humerus.

The blow would have shattered a man's arm. The Fiend's arm remained solid as the club bounced back from it, and his robes rustled ominously as he turned to face Arik. Will failed to gather another spell before the Fiend twisted abruptly and shot a dark bolt into his chest.

It didn't sting, didn't burn, didn't freeze. Didn't hurt at all, beyond a wave of nausea. Will understood even before he took in the flicker-quick motions of the others, even before he was aware of the way all sound had risen and converged into a frenetic buzzing.

No cure for a slowing spell but time, or a hastening spell to balance it out. He didn't have time. The Fiend blurred toward him, hands and eyes shining, pausing only to conjure enough ice to trap Arik beneath it. Will deployed his half-formed purification spell and watched the Fiend flit easily from its path.

When he tried to escape the Fiend's path, he found himself intercepted in the space of a blink. Not even gravity could hasten him. The Fiend raised a hand bright with red light, which snuffed out like a candle when Mina darted between him and Will. Her hiss droned like bee wings.

Under the Fiend's burning gaze, she shrank and pressed her fists to her temples. The distraction would have been long enough for Will to gather and release a spell, had time not been distorted inside him, but his palms were scarcely tingling when the Fiend's hand shot toward him.

In smears of motion that made his eyes water, Mina bit the Fiend's arm. Tooth ground against bone. The Fiend flailed at her, tattered robes and shadows flickering wildly.

As Will built up his spell, their motions grew smoother, and Mina's growl pitched lower and deeper; time oozed less sluggishly through him. They still moved unnaturally fast and were too entangled to afford him a clear shot. Mina would burn as readily as the Fiend.

"Now!" Bao yelled from somewhere on the other side of the tussle. She yelled it twice more before Mina broke her grip, snarled, and kicked clear of the Fiend. Will directed purifying light into his ribs, where it pulsed like a blazing heart.

It took the Fiend a moment longer this time to dispel the flames, and he was interrupted mid-gesture by Bao leaping at him from behind and grabbing his horns. Her feet drove down into his pelvis; still burning, he crashed face-first into the dirt with Bao on his back. She drew back her arm to strike him in the neck but was thrown clear of his body by an electric blast.

Will glanced between her and Arik, the former struggling back upright and the latter breaking the last of the thick slabs of ice holding him down. Focus on offense, Bao had said, and no one was bleeding. Drawing up stronger purification magic dizzied him.

The Fiend rose awkwardly, as if some of his vertebrae had snapped. He jerked out of the path of Will's spell and put himself near Arik, who had swapped his club for the rod. Where the club had rebounded, the rod cracked bone. A retaliatory blow laid Arik flat, but the Fiend's left arm hung useless.

"The rod—" Bao began, just before the Fiend's magic set fire to it. He turned on her, hands already red again. Nearby, Arik rolled over in a patch of melting ice, clumsy and probably concussed. 

Fire burst from Mina's hands. She babbled frantically, growling and garbling each syllable, but did not break the spell. The Fiend's robes went up like tinder; flames wrapped his bones in their place. He lunged at her to burn her with him.

Arik swung the smoking rod up into his chin. As the Fiend flew backward, Mina thrust her hands into the dirt to extinguish them.

Will scraped the reserves of his magic to add blue to the red blaze of the Fiend's skull. The Fiend burned brighter without being consumed, and already he was rising again. His lightning blasted the rod from Arik's hands.

Focus on offense. Will seized the rod, which was much heavier than he'd expected, and lobbed it awkwardly toward Bao.

Arik's leg swept into the back of Will's, knocking him over just in time for a sharp chunk of ice to graze the top of his head. A little blood, perhaps. No worse than a scrape. He tried not to think about the scent reaching Mina's nose.

The Fiend darted toward Bao as she slid to catch the rod. Despite her position, she swung the rod upward faster than the Fiend must have expected, faster than his flame-wracked body could react. The narrow end of the wood smashed into the junction of skull and spine.

The crack echoed down the vertebrae and out into the limbs as the Fiend's bones burst one by one into dust. Red and blue flames flickered out together. As the dust blew outward, Mina let out a long, sharp keen like nothing Will had ever heard from a human throat, and she collapsed as if her skeleton had crumbled.

Will made it to her side even before Bao could. When he felt for a pulse, the skin of her neck gave like old parchment under his fingers. A glance at her face twisted his stomach; the flesh over her right cheek was turning to grit, which sank inward.

"She's rotting." Will had meant to shout, but his head throbbed and his body ached. Through his increasingly blurred vision, he had the impression that Mina's skin was shrinking away from her hairline. "If we don't stop it—"

"Brace yourselves," said Bao as she snatched up her knapsack. With a sharp gasp she clasped her hands to her upper arms, dropping the container and spilling all four Orbs over the cavern floor.

Will's head throbbed with dark, amelodic music; his lungs burned as they tried to decide whether he had begun to drown. His fingers turned to foam. Somewhere beyond the cold boil of his blood, he heard Arik cursing and followed the sound back to the surface, where he could breathe again.

Panting, Will watched Bao grab one of the fallen Orbs and stagger with it to the altar. Twice she nearly fell as impossible winds assailed her balance. When Will tried to help, he found that his bones still considered themselves liquid.

Bao all but fell against the altar as she set the Orb in place. Nothing changed.

For a spumous moment, Will thought she might have chosen the wrong Orb, but she had always seemed able to tell them apart by instinct. He knew his own only because it flooded his senses. Gritting his teeth—which were not made of salt, he told himself, and were not dissolving—he crawled toward the reinforced pack and the Orb nearest it. Clumsy batting persuaded the Orb to roll.

He had scarcely pulled the flap down behind it when Bao rose and turned, her eyes clouded and unfocused. Will opened his mouth, uncertain what he was going to suggest, and coughed up seawater. 

"Hold on." Bao darted back to Mina's fallen form and grabbed it rather less gently than Will would have liked, but he was busy vomiting brine that probably wasn't even real, and it did no good to prevent bits of skin from sloughing off now if Mina collapsed into ash. Avoiding the thrashing form of Arik, whose body didn't seem to have realized yet that it was not burning, Bao dragged Mina to the altar and pressed her desiccated hands to the Orb.

Will's spine twisted like a corkscrew. His vision burst.

When the searing white faded, Bao's voice trickled in: "...know not to do that next time. Can you hear me? This part is your job!"

Something rattled him, and Will assembled the blasted pieces of his sight into the image of Bao pulling him up by the collar of his robe. The other two Orbs were out of sight again, and the knapsack secured. To his total lack of surprise, he found no sign of the ocean that had burned his throat.

With Bao's support, he made his way to Mina, who lay supine, her hands curled into stiff crescents, at the foot of the altar. Her Orb shone white above her and cut the chamber with elongated shadows.

Arik hovered, smelling faintly of singed hair. "Stab her an' see if she bleeds right."

Will waved him away. Positioning himself to block some of the dazzle from of the Orb, he knelt beside Mina and pressed for a pulse. He found none, but he noted with relief that the sinkhole in her cheek had stilled. A moment later, something like tar oozed out of the wound, followed by what looked like jellied rust. Her pulse remained undetectable, but Will was willing to blame his own tired, trembling hands. He waited until the secretion flowed thin and red before sealing her cheek with a potion.

The shriveled flesh of Mina's face began to thicken and smooth. When the first signs of pink tinged her pallor, Will let out a long-held breath. "She bleeds right."

A moment later her body seized with a gasp, and Bao held her upright as she coughed up grit and tar. When her breathing calmed, Arik stooped beside her and asked, "You all right now?"

Mina coughed again and looked up at him, her eyes bloodshot and her mouth and chin speckled with whatever had come out of her lungs. She nodded.

Arik grabbed her in a crushing hug, eliciting a squeak of either surprise or pain. When he released her, she wheezed and smiled shakily.

"I feel better," she said, letting Bao wipe at the mess on her face. "Really _better_, like—"

"Like y'just hacked up after drinkin' all night?"

"Yes, actually." Mina vomited again, this time thick ropes of black mucus, as Bao held her hair out of her way. Her pale face flushed.

As Mina investigated her palms, which were tight and shiny with new burn scars, Will palmed an empty vial and collected a sample from the floor. Not even the elves had leaked anything half so interesting.

"You ain't right in th' head," Arik muttered from somewhere above him. Will ignored the remark and pocketed the vial, nearly fumbling it as his exhaustion caught up with his adrenaline. When the floor tipped up toward him, someone thoughtfully caught the hood of his robe.

The falling curtain of unconsciousness was rent by the sudden lurching of the cavern. Pebbles pelted Will's head as sunlight dimmed the glare of Mina's Orb, and his eyes ached even as they were drawn to a long gash in the rock above the altar. He blinked to scatter the dust from his eyelashes.

"Huh," said Mina. With Bao's support she stood beside the altar, her bare hand cupped over the top of her Orb. When she drummed her fingers, the far wall crumbled into the suggestion of zigzagging stairs. 

They stared up at the blue patch of sky until Mina said, "Well, come on. I'm ready for some fresh air."

* * *

By the time they reached the surface, Mina overflowed with energy. Where she stepped, the rotted ground became black soil. This discovery set her to running in giddy patterns, ignoring Will's warnings not to overtax herself while she was still convalescing, until Arik threatened to pick her up and carry her the rest of the way to Melmond.

Convalescing or not, Mina looked even healthier now than she had before the vampire's bite; her eyes were bright and clear, her hair was thick and silky, and the sun seemed to be restoring color to her skin, which now had the ruddy undertones of someone who had just finished exercising. 

When Will began to point this out, Arik cut him off with, "Don't care. She's makin' me dizzy."

"She's alive again," Bao replied. "Let her enjoy it."

It seemed like the wrong time to quibble with "alive," especially when there was no better diagnosis at hand. Will crouched and scooped up some of the newly fertile soil on his fingertips, which he got most of the way to his face before Bao stopped him. "I'm only smelling it," he said, with a hint of reproach. The scent reminded him of the clinic's garden at the start of spring, teeming with muck and potential. "She's radiating life. I've never even heard of magic like this."

No one but Mina had to energy to make it far from the cave; they made camp with her still frolicking around them. When Bao convinced her to settle in for an early supper, the earth's healing radiated out from where she sat, faster and faster, until Will had to squint against the horizon to see any trace of the rot. Their victory would probably precede them to Melmond.

Arik plucked the desiccated chickens as the others gathered around the stacked wood that would become their campfire. Will settled in next to Mina, who read his intentions and scooted away before he had even opened his mouth to ask.

"I'm fine," she said. "Better than fine. I don't need you examining me."

Will frowned. "Just let me check your wound and your pulse. I'm concerned—"

"I'm not." Her tone suggested the opposite.

Bao caught Will's gaze for a moment, then headed over to help Arik with the chickens and engage him in a privacy screen of conversation. After a stiff silence, Mina thrust her arm toward Will and raised her voice over the buzz: "I don't need you to check my pulse because I don't _have_ one."

Arik and Bao went quiet and turned to face her. Will pressed his fingers to her proffered wrist and felt nothing but flesh like warm clay. When he reached for her throat, she sighed loudly through her nose but didn't jerk away. He found the vein and found it still.

"How," Bao began, but Mina cut her off sharply with, "I don't know. I feel blood instead of ashes inside me, but there's nothing pumping it. I think my Orb just... filled in what the rot decayed."

Will moved his hand down her throat, glancing at her for permission before tugging aside the fabric over her bite. It had closed, at last, but strangely; the flesh filling the holes was white, waxy, warm, and little like a scar. She shook him off when she deemed he'd investigated long enough.

"But your body's warm again." Bao didn't lift the words into a question, but she did look to Mina for confirmation: "You don't crave blood."

"An' y'don't stink as much," Arik added.

Mina glared at him. "As if you smell daisy-fresh after that cave." 

Not undead, not dead, not quite alive. When Will brushed a thin sheen of healing magic over her hand, she didn't flinch. No cure for vampirism, perhaps, but a strange and sideways one.

A thousand questions danced on his tongue (_are you human, will you age, do you sleep, what happens when the other Orbs shine again_), but Mina's expression grew pinched as she watched his face. "I don't want to be your experiment," she said. "I don't even want to talk about it anymore."

Not trusting himself to talk around it, Will nodded and fished Sarda's journal out of his pack. His pen scratched like an excitable dog against the blank pages.

Mina snorted. "If you plan to take that thing back to Sarda, I'm not coming along."

"He'd be fascinated," Bao pointed out.

"I _know_."

In the ensuing pause, Bao's face reflected several expressions that Will recognized from the night he found her drunk on the boat, the night they watched the drained hyena burn, the night she bound him to an Orb. She set her mouth against them and said, "Whatever you are, you're ours."

Will glanced up to watch Mina frown and drew her knees up to her chest. "I am," she replied slowly, face hidden by the shadow of her hat. "I should've known you'd be the death of me."

"Who _ain't_ been dead lately?" Arik muttered. "Used t'think I was special."

Bao elbowed him, then hesitated before sitting down beside Mina. When she spoke, her voice was low and soft but steady: "I'm not sorry. I can't be. If I let the Orbs go unrestored, we'd all be dead soon."

Mina shrugged as much as her posture allowed. "I never said we wouldn't. Hell, I might have died alone in that temple. Or else saved the princess myself and actually gotten somewhere with her." She tipped her chin to face Bao. "We all die, one way or another."

In the quiet that followed, Arik resumed ripping the feathers out of the chickens. Will set down his notebook to make it clear that he wasn't examining before asking, "Is your white magic still gone?"

Mina opened her palm and stared intently at it for several seconds before letting her hand fall. "It's like trying to drink from a dry well. I suppose my Orb didn't fix that part of me."

"You can't just—" Bao gestured vaguely— "fill it up with your black magic?"

"That's not how it works. It's the wrong shape." Mina's knees straighted as she began to uncurl herself. "My Orb missed my teeth, too, or maybe just didn't care about them." She angled her face into the light and grinned briefly, displaying a mouthful of jagged points. "It's mostly my eyeteeth I'm worried about," she added, and tapped her tongue against one. "I keep cutting my lips on them."

"Y'won't be kissin' no princesses till you file 'em down, that's for sure," said Arik.

After curling her lips back in a mock-snarl, Mina blew him an exaggerated kiss.

Something had shifted in the air; if they weren't all right, if "all right" had leapt forever out of reach the moment teeth sank into flesh or Orb sank into soul, they were at least going to manage. 

As Arik performed culinary surgery on the chickens, Mina helped herself to Bao's knapsack and eased open the flap. The usual disorienting hum began in the back of Will's head, but Mina seemed unaffected even after she removed the glowing Earth Orb and pulled the straps tight again. She curled one hand over the Orb and pressed the other to the soil. 

For several seconds, she sat in focused silence, eyes closed, breaths deep, and forehead glistening with sweat. When she raised her hand from the dirt, green pinpricks of grass marked the site of her palm. She looked rather pleased with herself.

Bao studied the contour of the new growth, brow halfway to a furrow. "If all the Orbs are like this..."

So far, Will's Orb had mostly buzzed inside his head and shown him how it would feel to drown. Perhaps all the Orbs demanded that their vessels be hollowed out, rotted or burnt or blown or washed away, so that they could be remade from the inside out. He didn't expect to sleep well that night.

Arik grinned broadly. "Can't wait t'get mine lit up."

Bao's eye twitched. "We're saving yours for last."

"Unless I die again an' turn into a fire vampire or somethin'." He ran his tongue over the tips of his teeth. "Then you'd do the same for me, yeah?"

"No, we'd just replace you." Bao's delivery was so deadpan that it took Will a moment to realize that she wasn't serious. Arik burst into ragged laughter.

"Bitch," he said fondly.

* * *

[Coneria, two hundred and seventy-six days before Midsummer]

The old woman had died on Will's watch, despite his best efforts. No wound to close, no poison to cleanse, nothing even to diagnose—just a steady, relentless wearing down of the body, and nothing to do for it but dull the pain. He sat with her as she wore out.

Funerals weren't the business of Will or his master, but the woman had come alone and lingered unclaimed. So he followed a funerary wizard to the city's edge, through the slow drizzle of the rain, and watched her ashes scatter. "We commit her body to the four," the wizard intoned. "Fire, transform her; wind and water, bear her; earth, embrace her."

Those wishing to be committed only to the earth had to pay for the privilege. Everyone else had to be shared.

When he returned to the clinic, somber and soggy, his master was brewing healing potions over a low flame. He waited until the end of what he knew was the tricky part before asking, "Why did you tell me to see to her when there wasn't any way to save her?"

The apothecary didn't look up from stirring. "That was the point."

"I don't follow. Sir."

After a few more swirls of his stick, the apothecary left the potion to simmer and met Will's gaze through his spectacles. "If you think of our work as a battle against death, sooner or later you'll come up against the realization that death always wins. Necromancers, wraiths, liches—many of them were once great healers seeking to escalate a war that shouldn't even be waged."

Will scowled. "But we stop people from dying. That's our _point_."

"Everyone who leaves this clinic still dies, boy. Just not today, and not in pain, if we have any say in it. Our work is about life." Returning to his stirring, he added, "And right now, _your_ work is about fetching me three more drams of monkshood."

The rain increased steadily, soaking through Will's robes and gloves and wicking the early autumn chill to his skin, but he still found himself lingering in the garden. Give the flowers water and light, but not too much; kill them by tearing out their roots; powder the roots and measure carefully, tracing the fine line between poison and anodyne. He wondered how old he'd be before the world started making sense.

* * *

[The Melmond marshes, Midsummer]

Will woke with a jolt, gasping for air. Muscles spasmed in his chest. Already the dream was fading into the warm darkness of the tent; he remembered only suffocation and salt, deep below a blackness that coated the water like ink. As his eyes adjusted, he made out Mina's form sitting up opposite him, her posture concerned.

"I'm all right," he said, bringing his breaths under control. "Just a nightmare."

"You've been tossing and turning." Before he could ask, she added, "I don't think I sleep anymore."

She'd eaten, apparently without vomiting it back up afterward, but Will wondered if she had needed to. Perhaps it was better that she mimicked life as much as she could. "You probably shouldn't tell Arik that," he replied, "unless you want to take the watch every night."

"Maybe I should. I don't know." She rubbed idly at where the vampire had bitten her. "You'd have the tent to yourself."

"I grew up as an oblate. Honestly, it feels a little strange sharing this much space with only one person."

Mina laughed. "'Grew up,' because you think you're grown up now? Shit, I don't think _I_ am. Was." All the amusement drained out of her. Drawing her knees up, she faced away from Will.

He bit back a platitude that only would have annoyed them both. After a long, heavy silence, he said, "Maybe we'll never understand it, and that's all right, I think. When you start thinking you understand everything, you get, er, necromancers."

She snorted but tilted her face back toward him. "I really have no idea how your mind works."

"Neither do I, sometimes."

The silence that followed was longer but lighter, almost comfortable. "Go back to sleep," Mina said eventually. "I'm sure we'll have a busy day in Melmond tomorrow. And Elfland afterward, if we let the pirates choose."

Will settled back against his pillow. "I'll try. If you want any help filing your teeth down, I'm sure I'll have plenty of time on the ship."

The faint light caught the shape of her smile. "I might take you up on that."


End file.
